GDLY precision manufacturing technology Corportaion, which is “Excellent in Apple’s industrial chain” and “leading enterprise in precision functional parts”, has entered the field of heat pipes and Vapor-Chamber soaking plate since 2016.
With just one Vapor-Chamber soaking plate product line, GDLY can achieve 800 million to 1 billion yuan in revenue every year, and it is the “hidden champion enterprise” in the Vapor-Chamber soaking plate segment.
With the development of 5G communication technology, smart phones have higher requirements for chip integration, and the heat flux density per unit volume is also higher. This means that in order to ensure the good operation of the CPU, the demand for heat dissipation in mobile phones is also more urgent.
In the field of mobile phone heat dissipation, in recent years, thin plate-like products made of copper material—Vapor-Chamber soaking plate and heat pipe—have been widely used. Stainless steel soaking plate has always been a technical problem in the industry.
The ultra-thin stainless steel soaking plate developed by GDLY can be applied to the fields of consumer electronics and new energy vehicles.
5G driver cooling solution upgrade
At present, passive heat dissipation methods are commercially used on a large scale in the mobile phone industry, which mainly include graphite heat dissipation, frame heat dissipation, thermal gel heat dissipation, heat pipe heat dissipation, and soaking plates.
Among them, the Vapor-Chamber soaking plate is considered to be the main way to solve the heat dissipation problem of mobile phones in the future. With the continuous improvement of chip power density, Vapor-Chamber soaking plate has been widely used in the heat dissipation of high-power devices such as CPU, NP, and ASIC.
The heat dissipation principle of this product is to dissipate heat through the phase change of the internal liquid working medium, that is, after contacting the integrated circuit (IC) and the central processing unit (CPU) and other heat sources, the liquid evaporates and takes away the heat through vaporization to become Vapor diffusion. The vapor dissipates heat away from the heat source and then cools down, becomes liquid again, and flows back to the heat source along the capillary wick.
In 2016, GDLY cut into the field of heat pipe and Vapor-Chamber soaking plate. “We started with graphite flakes and graphene-based processing to create related heat dissipation components.” GDLY’s CTO introduced to the Hay Think team. “But with the arrival of the first year of 5G in 2019, GDLY quickly recognized this important In the first quarter, we established a laboratory and established a research and development team. By the end of 2020, the production line with a production capacity of 4 million heat pipes per month and a production line of 6 million Vapor-Chamber soaking plates per month will be completed.”
At present, the mainstream soaking plates on the market use copper as the main material. GDLY’s R&D team found that although copper has good thermal conductivity, it becomes soft after high temperature treatment and has poor mechanical properties. It is difficult for this product to achieve a thickness of 0.3mm or even 0.2mm thinner. And the cost is relatively high.
How to solve the above problems?
The research and development team set their sights on the stainless steel material.
A new situation has emerged. Under this scheme, stainless steel will react with water at high temperatures, resulting in the disappearance of the heat dissipation effect. This is the core difficulty that plagues the industry. In addition, the welding and flatness of stainless steel materials are also a major test.
While developing copper soaking plate products, GDLY’s R&D team began to focus on overcoming the technical difficulties of the above-mentioned stainless steel soaking plate.
In 2019, GDLY will simultaneously develop the stainless steel Vapor-Chamber soaking plate. The R&D team has a little bit of work on heat treatment, welding, and surface treatment technology. The result is quite exciting, the final product passed 2000 hours of internal testing. In the first half of this year, we communicated and cooperated with customers repeatedly, and finally received orders from customers in July 2021 to provide them with 0.3mm stainless steel Vapor-Chamber soaking plate. “
The heat dissipation solutions and core technologies provided by GDLY are all independently developed. The stainless steel Vapor-Chamber soaking plate is the first in the industry. “The technical advantage is firstly thinness. The thickness of the Vapor-Chamber soaking plate has broken through from 0.4mm to 0.3mm and 0.2mm. 0.2mm is currently the world’s ultra-thin stainless steel Vapor-Chamber soaking plate. In terms of materials, stainless steel is corrosion-resistant and mechanical The performance is more than twice that of copper material, and automated mass production has been achieved. More importantly, GDLY combines the advantages accumulated in the stamping process internally, and successfully applies the stamping process instead of the traditional etching process, and can obtain 10% of the cost in an instant The above cost reduction has a very large competitive advantage in this field.”
Leap in electric vehicles
Not only can it be applied to high-end smart phones, the application scenarios of the GDLY cooling solution also have a larger application space.
The Vapor-Chamber soaking plate has a space of 4.3 billion yuan in the Chinese mobile phone market, there are many new areas, and there is a huge increase in consumer electronics. Electric vehicles also bring new demands for heat dissipation. This will be a huge blue ocean.
It is worth noting that just this year, GDLY issued a number of announcements, indicating that it will go deep into new energy vehicles, AR/VR, medical, clean energy and other new intelligent manufacturing fields.
Among them, the field of new energy vehicles will become the next important layout for leading the development of intelligence.
New energy vehicles bring important opportunities, among which there are many heat dissipation requirements. For example, after the lightweight upgrade, there are new requirements for the structural parts of the new energy battery, and the battery pack also needs to upgrade the heat dissipation scheme. GDLY’s stainless steel soaking plate is also suitable for new energy vehicles.