Thin vapor chamber heat sink and embedded heat pipe heat sink performance evaluations

Vapor chamber and heat pipe technologies are not new concepts, but their fabrication and manufacturing processes have been improving. Both vapor chambers and heat pipes have been getting thinner allowing the integrated heat sink design with increased fin surfaces. For example, for vapor chambers, the minimum achievable thickness has been reduced from 5 mm to 3 mm. These improvements help enhance performance while allowing for consistent performance for a particular product. Understanding the current limits of these technologies between several designs and fabrication processes are the motivation behind this study. Thin vapor chamber base heat sink technologies from different vendors are investigated and compared to embedded heat pipe base heat sinks.