Many applications, primarily those for burn-in, require that a single thermal interface material survive multiple insertions. In response to this demand, one focus in our thermal lab has been testing many different materials in these applications. The outcome has been that we have proven our metal interface materials capable of withstanding thousands of insertions. The best thermal interface materials we have found for these applications were those leaving little to no residue and those which were inherently stiff. These materials were the most robust due to their low resistance and stiffness. Soft interfaces such as pure indium provided the best thermal performance between intertions 50-500, but were not as reliable as others long-term because of its malleability. Indium will retain its compressed image even after it has been removed from the chip it was compressed on.
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