The ability to manipulate heat flow has numerous promising benefits in thermal energy applications such as in heat spreader design. This paper introduces a novel thermal functional metamaterials heat spreader with high anisotropy. The metamaterial heat spreader consists of alternating layers of copper/VHTC and PDMS thin films. The effects of the number of bilayers, bilayers' thermal conductivity ratio, and thermal spreader thickness on the metamaterial lateral heat spreading have been investigated numerically. In comparison to a simple copper heat spreader, results show significant enhancements of the lateral heat spreading with both the copper and VHTC based metamaterial heat spreaders. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.