Reuse of heatsink

I will be moving an Apalis T30 module with heatsink from my Ixora board to a prototype board, and I have a strong sense the pad between module and heatsink may come apart.

What is my best option – Do I fill in with regular thermal paste? Does Toradex provide extra pads?

Thank You.

  • Ebbe

You can buy thermal pad separately. For example - Amazon.com: ARCTIC TP-2 (APT2560): Economic Thermal Pad, 145 x 145 x 1.0 mm (1 Piece) - Thermal pad, Excellent Heat Conduction, Low Hardness, Ideal Gap Filler, Easy Installation, Safe handling - Blue : Office Products

Thermal paste should work OK as well if there is no significant gap between SOC and a heatsink.

Thanks Alex. T30 calls for “Type 2”, which is 1.15mm. Closest I could find is 1.0mm – good enough?

The thermal resistance will be higher and the whole thermal solution less efficient/effective therefore. However, it will probably work good enough for most use cases. As you probably anyway just use this setup for debugging/developing, I don’t see any problem with the 1mm pad. If you start seeing thermal shut downs due to high temperature in the CPU, you know that it’s not good enough. But I really don’t expect this. So just give it a try.

Yes 1mm pad is OK.