PhD position in multi-material additive manufacturing for advanced chip cooling

Job description

We offer a fully funded 4-year PhD position within the University of Twente on the development of ultra-efficient cooling technologies for advanced semiconductor packaging. The project, UltraCool, combines materials science, additive manufacturing, thermal engineering, and semiconductor integration to enable direct bonding between silicon and high-conductivity metals such as copper.

The rapid growth of AI and high-performance computing is driving heat fluxes in advanced chip packages beyond 1,000 W/cm², making thermal management one of the key bottlenecks for future electronics. This PhD project aims to address this challenge through the design of novel interlayer alloys, development of multi-material Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) processes, and integration of cooling functionality directly into package-level demonstrators.

The research will focus on the thermodynamic design of interlayer alloy feedstocks, powder production and charac...