The Japanese have proposed removing heat from chips on motherboards with large copper rivets

The Japanese company OKI Circuit Technology, which has been producing printed circuit boards for over 50 years, has introduced a new approach for cooling chips. The proposed solution is essentially copper rivets on the boards with large round or square caps on both sides. This is said to improve heat dissipation from electronics by 55 times and is much better than active cooling with heatsinks and fans.

Image source: OKI Circuit Technology

The caps or pads can be of different sizes, from 10 mm or less, but one simple rule should be followed: the pad on the back of the board, from where heat is dissipated in one way or another, must be larger than the pad under the chip. For better heat transfer, the copper bridge from one surface to another must also have a sufficiently large diameter. This is reminiscent of the approach used to remove heat from crystal elements, which is partly occupied by metallization channels, only on a much larger scale.

OKI recommends using its development for cooling miniature electronics in space, where cooling with fans is pointless. But no one bothers to organize the heat sink from the chips on the motherboard of a computer or smartphone in the same way. Moreover, for even better heat removal, you can intensify the process from the rear side by combining the rear parts of the rivets with the housing elements or connecting active cooling. At the same time, due to the addition of a relatively large volume of copper, motherboards can become 50–100 grams heavier, acquiring real weight in every sense in the eyes of users.