Thermal Management of Electronic Equipment: Research Needs in the Mid-1990s and Beyond

As electronic devices and equipment are finding their ways into diverse applications, their physical integrity becomes a matter of utmost concern. The thermal design criteria customarily assumed in many of previous heat transfer research programs have to be replaced by those on the thermomechanical load in compact systems. Attempts to find thermal and stress fields in critical parts of components, however, are beset by geometrical complexities and multiple length and time scales involved in transport processes in electronic equipment. Modeling of complex systems is the subject left for further rationalization. Also needed is the foresight about possible hardware morphologies taken by electronic equipment in the future. In view of possible saturation of 2D packaging technology, heat transfer studies for 3D packaging are worth being undertaken. Common to different scenarios of hardware development is the need to critically review the methodology and focuses of fundamental heat transfer research.