IC Diamond was originally designed as a high reliability T1 or T2compound for use between the IHS and CPU or between IHS and sink. IC Diamond is highly bulk loaded with over 92% micronized diamond particles, 94% fully bulk loaded  counting other misc. particles. The highly loaded mix is required to limit pump out due to thermal cycling, basically the reasoning behind it is that it is harder to pump or bake out a solid than a lesser, lightly loaded liquid type compound grease.

Bake out and pump out are well known and documented as primary causes of grease failure. A viable or optimal compound is one that utilizes as little of any kind material (liquids)as possible that would be the central cause of of a TIM joint failure, while at the same time maintaining the best thermal performance possible. With the introduction of IC Diamond Thermal Compound we believe we have managed all the criteria for an optimal TIM by combining both performance and reliability. Effectively suitable for the system builder, performance hobbyist or OEM customer.

Innovation Cooling has an ongoing program of reliability testing. Pictured below are some initial accelerated tests with some 3X10 glass slides, we are still roughing out  procedures so take it for what it is. Attached picture of test result was run for 20 hours at 150C, the center picture ICD is IC Diamond. The others are commonly used retail performance pastes. Not a drop dead test but it does highlight the stability of ICD7. The competition compounds feature the formation of voids,  and span the range of initial failure to complete failure. IC diamond  was observed to have no visible points of failure under these conditions. The picture is back lighted so the void formation is clearly visible

Additional Testing 

ICD7 has been tested in a thermal cycling chamber - from -40 C to +85 C - for up to 250 cycles (with the copper block heated with 130 W of power (along with a fan heat sink) and found no change in thermal performance / thermal resistance of the grease

In another thermal test  ICD7 was placed in a thermal chamber for a continuous 1000 hrs @125 C with no change in thermal performance.

In a separate test we pulled "full vacuum" on ICD7 with a mechanical pump for ca. 65 hours at room temperature. The resulting ... weight loss was almost immeasurable - 0.3 mg out of 6.2222 g. This works out to be 0.0048 wt %.

We have one system application where we have been running approximately 2 years with no change in thermal performance in a normal office environment.

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