Thermal Management Research Advances to Enable Next Generation RF Devices and Systems

An overview of ongoing DARPA programs is presented. THREADS reduces device thermal resistance while maintaining good channel current transport properties and develops architectures that move heat from high-power transistors without degrading performance. Three-dimensional heterogeneous integration (3DHI) presents unique opportunities for RF systems, but is currently limited to low power levels, due to limited heat transfer capabilities, large overall size and power consumption of current thermal management technologies. Minitherms3D seeks to develop a compact thermal management technology scalable to an arbitrarily large number of high-power tiers in a 3D stack, while reducing the overall size of the thermal management system.