Abstract

For decades, miniaturization has been the hallmark of electronics.  Efforts to make things smaller span an enormous range of dimensions, from nanoscale transistors and thumbnail-sized chips to smartphones, vehicle electronics, and even server farms.  Heat management is often the bottleneck in the further miniaturization of these technologies, leading to many examples where decreasing size and increasing functional density results in overheating.  Although heat removal in electronics at room temperature is typically governed by a hierarch of conduction and convection phenomena, heat dissipation in cryogenic electronics can face a fundamental limit analogous to that of blackbody emission of electromagnetic radiation.