Three Decades of DARPA’s Thermal Management of Microsystems

In the early 1990s, scientists in the Microsystem Technology Office (MTO) of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began their work by first identifying and defining the inherent challenges of thermal management of microsystems. Their early, foundational research eventually enabled higher device power density and high hot spot heat fluxes mitigation, according to “Three Decades of Thermal Management Research at DARPA.”  

Yogendra Joshi recently set aside time to address questions about DARPA’s MTO solutions that most people would connect to smartphones and semiconductors, and has culminated in current application-specific thermal management answers, such as enabling 3D heterogeneous integration systems with high interconnect density and power amplifiers operating near the limit of radio frequency (RF) output power.