One of the important components of a heat sink is the heat spreader which improves the heat dissipation from the chip into the environment. The improvement due to the spreading of the heat flux over a wider area is partially counteracted by the spreading resistance, i.e., resistance due to the longer path taken by the heat flux. Several studies have been carried out to determine the spreading resistance; which includes cylindrical as well as cartesian co-ordinate system.
The heat spreader tends to be the most significant mass in the heat sink. Therefore selection of the heat spreader dimension deserves serious consideration; this is particularly true in high heat flux situations. The focus of this is to examine the optimum dimension of heat spreader as a function of the thermal and geometric parameters of the heat sink problem.