NovoLINC said in the announcement that its MaxLINC thermal interface material reached 400 W/cm² of uniform heat flux and 3,300 W of total power on a production-representative silicon test die carrying about 150 µm of warpage. The Pittsburgh company announced the result on Oct. 6, 2026.
The test used a single-phase direct liquid cooling cold plate supplied by CoolIT, an Ecolab Company. NovoLINC said the complete thermal stack held the silicon junction temperature below 90 °C throughout, which it presented as evidence that the material transfers heat effectively even when die warpage creates difficult mechanical and thermal interface conditions.
The company said warpage is becoming a more important thermal design problem as AI processors move toward higher power and larger packages, because small departures from flatness can produce uneven contact between the semiconductor and the cooling system, raising thermal resistance and potentially creating localized hot spots. MaxLINC is built on what NovoLINC describes as a nanostructured composite architecture intended to pair low thermal resistance with mechanical compliance so that contact is maintained across non-flat surfaces.
Dr. Sheng Shen, the company's chief technology officer, said NovoLINC is working with companies in single-phase direct liquid cooling, two-phase direct liquid cooling and immersion cooling, and that the results set out a thermal roadmap in which the material is combined with current and future liquid cooling systems. Ben Sutton, a product marketing manager at CoolIT, said data center operators making long-term infrastructure decisions need confidence that the cooling they install will keep pace with future silicon, and that pairing CoolIT cold plates with MaxLINC shows single-phase direct liquid cooling can handle high-heat-flux processors well into the next decade without the cost and complexity of changing cooling architectures.
NovoLINC said the platform is designed for use along the thermal pathway, from direct chip-to-cooling interfaces and chip-to-package heat spreaders to interfaces between packaged devices and cold plates or other cooling hardware. MaxLINC samples are available for customer evaluation and qualification, the company said.
