The Critical Importance of Thermal Management Technology for the Nordic Electronics Industry.
“Electronics is hotter than ever” is a phrase frequently uttered whenever the industry describes today’s development and the current digital revolution’s dependence on hardware.
The whole digitalisation — Industry 4.0, AI, IoT, 5G, Machine Learning, robots, autonomous self-driving vehicles, blockchain technology, etc — all depends on new generations of electronics hardware that can deliver higher performance in smaller packages and with shorter latencies than ever previously developed by industry.
However, this means that the phrase also has another, more literal meaning; no less true: electronics are getting hotter than ever also because the power density — the density of components that do things, and thus consume power, and therefore generate heat — is higher than ever, and growing rapidly.
The thermal challenges, and the ability to solve them. thus embed a critical, indeed fateful, issue for the industry: In the race to win the contracts for the next generation of electronics, sooner or later a point comes when the winner is the one who has best managed to stave off the next Power Wall; in other words, inevitably: the one that is best able to employ the most superior thermal management technology.
And yet, paradoxically, this is an issue that sees little focus or systematic approach in both industry and academia, especially here in the Nordic countries.