Brief Historical Perspective in Thermal Management and the Shift Toward Management at the Nanoscale

Since the early days of computing, excess heat has been a major road block in the design and development of faster, more efficient, and more compact electronic devices. Coupled with improvements in thermal management has been a reduction in the size of major electronic components, primarily transistors. This has expanded the field of thermal management down into the nanoscale, where the rules of thermal transport become more complicated. This paper presents a brief perspective on the historical challenges in thermal management and outlines the major length scale regimes where thermal management is being developed. In particular, the expansion of thermal management into the nanoscale is presented due to the consequence that as the feature size of most nano-devices continues to diminish, the impact of thermal transport across solid-solid interfaces on device performance, reliability, and lifetime becomes increasingly important.