Abstract
Since its founding in 1992, DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office has sought to revolutionize the field of semiconductor devices. As the performance of these devices are inherently tied to their operating temperatures, DARPA has inspected many approaches to electronics thermal management through many decades. Exploratory studies in the 1990s aimed to find the most efficient heat dissipation mechanisms, including diamond substrates in the Diamond 3D-MCM program and spray cooling and thermosyphons in the HERETIC program. Investigations into remote cooling in the mid-2000s led to advancements in micro-scale MEMS devices in cryogenics through the MCC program and thermal interface materials and vapor chambers in the TMT program. Advancing on these technologies, the NJTT and ICECool programs in the 2010s examined embedded cooling using diamond substrates and microfluidic cooling within and between chips. Finally, the most recent efforts investigate application-specific problems, including 3D heterogeneous integration in the Minitherms3D program and GaN power amplifiers in the THREADS program.
