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The performance of electronics degrades as temperature increases from the ambient temperature. The temperature of a device increases when the device is on since no system operates at 100% efficiency. Output power is not equal to the power fed to the device, and the difference between this is power loss. Power loss appears as thermal energy, which increases the temperature of the device. All electronics require a thermal management system. Its purpose is straightforward: Keep your device temperature below its maximum capacity (and ideally at room/ambient temperature).
Thermal management is a critical consideration for many technologies and markets, from electric vehicle battery packs to data centers and 5G devices. Electric vehicles (EVs) are the future of the automotive industry; unfortunately 2020 appears to have been the year of the EV recall due to battery fires. In China, 10,579 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) have been recalled due to fire hazards across 7 OEMs (January to October). General Motors has recalled 68,667 Chevrolet Bolts, telling owners not to park their cars near their house or in their garage for risk of fire.
Recent years have seen an increasing application of vapor chambers within smartphones to improve heat spreading. However, their future is far from set, with several high-end models still using graphite heat spreaders for their reduced complexity, cost and weight. For example in 2020, Samsung, who have previously hyped vapor chambers, have used a graphite heat spreader or a copper vapor chamber in the Note 20 interchangeably. Additionally for 2020, Apple’s first 5G phones, the iPhone 12 lineup, all use graphite heat spreaders and have not adopted vapor chambers.
South Korean giant Samsung suffered $3 billion in lost income from to its move to scrap the fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 phone. One of the main causes of catching fire appears to continuous increase in energy density of Lithium-ion battery units driven by increased user requirements including full HD, large processing requirements of multi-core CPUs and increasing desire to produce sleeker design.
Increased densities, of course, mean increased heat – and increased heat means greater chances of unreliable operation and premature component failure. Additionally, despite the high efficiency of power electronics, the enormous amounts of electrical power transmitted in many applications mean very large heat loads must be managed.
Cooling challenges are only exacerbated by the harsh environments in which increasing numbers of electronic subsystems – and especially power electronics – are deployed. Classic examples of such challenging environments are subject not only to significant changes in temperature but also to shock and vibration – include automotive and other forms of transportation; industrial equipment; military vehicles; and power generation and networks.
The thermal energy due to power loss is removed through conduction (surface), convection (air), or radiation (space) mode of heat transfer. There are numerous methodologies to implement these different modes of heat transfer. Thermal engineers have developed a number of creative approaches to deal with these challenges, but all have their drawbacks. Traditionally, designers have favored passive heat transfer devices like heat sinks or heat pipes, generally made from aluminum or copper.
A heat sink, which has high thermal conductivity, increases the area of heat conduction. The result is that heat is rapidly removed from the hot area to the surrounding medium (which is at a lower temperature). These thermal devices offer the advantage of having no moving parts to fail, reducing maintenance needs to a minimum. But aluminum has limited conductivity, which has a greater impact as electronics become more powerful, and copper is relatively heavy (three times as heavy as aluminum).
One of the most common challenges in thermal design is removing heat from hot spots and using the available cooling system effectively. For example, to implement the forced-air cooling placement of a fan has to be done to remove heat from the components which are most likely to get heated and critical for the reliability of the system. If done incorrectly, it deteriorates the performance and durability of the system. Another standard method for cooling is using liquid coolant. The advantage of using liquid coolant over fans is that they do not consume additional power and compact the system.
Thermal Interface materials for 5G
5G promises incredible download rates and extremely low latency communication. The first 5G smartphones came to the market in 2019, but the market has expanded rapidly in 2020. Early 5G phones were commonly reported to overheat rapidly, especially in warmer climates when using mmWave, dropping to the use of 4G to keep temperatures down. Material utilization around the mmWave antenna also reveals challenges with signal propagation. This presents an opportunity for materials suppliers to address these challenges. The key markets will be for thermal interface materials (TIMs), heat spreaders and thermal insulation materials.
Several new thermal materials for 5G applications were released in 2020. For TIMs, DOW introduced the DOWSIL TC-3065 Thermal Gel with a thermal conductivity of 6.5 W/mK and bondline thicknesses down to 150 microns, specifying applications in optical transceivers, solid-state disks and other network devices. Henkel also announced their portfolio of TIMs for 5G infrastructure, including the BERGQUIST LIQUI-FORM TLF 6000HG gel-type TIM with 6.0 W/mK thermal conductivity and their BERGQUIST GAP PAD TGP 10000ULM with a 10 W/mK thermal conductivity and plans for a 12 W/mK version. Another significant material release in 2020 was the announcement of W.L. Gore’s Thermal Insulation material for smartphones, this material has a thermal conductivity lower than air, helping reduce hot spots on the device surface, but is also compatible with the new mmWave 5G antenna that can struggle with signal propagation
Military Thermal Management requirements
The problem of heat generation in military systems and commercial systems is becoming increasingly complex with ongoing trend of miniaturized electronics in spaces that are continually becoming smaller. Thermal devices for today’s military system must be small and compact, due to stringent weight and space/volume constraints, as in fighter aircraft, where every ounce and each cubic inch can impact performance. SWaP-constrained systems are, by definition, difficult to cool with restricted areas for air to move around and fans to drive air around simply add weight, power and are a mechanical source of potential unreliability.
Further, Military systems must operate under conditions far more demanding than most civilian applications, from radar transmit-receive modules functioning in oppressive desert or tropical heat, to satellite and aerospace systems that deal with both electronics generated heat and intense ambient cold. Automotive and other forms of transportation are subjected to shock and vibration. Even in this harsh environment military systems are expected to have mission-critical reliability.
The real engineering challenges are also compounded by factors like shock and vibration, high altitudes, dust and dirt, salt spray, humidity, and many others. Thermal-management techniques that work at sea level might not at 40,000 feet. Blown air might be insufficient in the desert heat or on an airport tarmac.
Thermal solutions must also be able to reject heat efficiently, even where packaging volumes are limited and cannot be expanded, as in satellite applications. Maintenance needs must be kept to a minimum because repairs may be difficult in the field or at sea (e.g., submarine electronics cooling systems), or even impossible in certain aerospace applications such as satellites, according to Aavid Thermacore.
New weapons and systems like electromagnetic (EM) launchers, high power microwaves and laser systems use stored electrical energy, rather than explosives, to attack or destroy the target. They exhibit pulsed operation and require electrical energy at the gigawatt power level. The thermal cooling solutions are also required in these applications.
GE in conjunction with DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have developed technologies such as Thermal Management Technology Bridge, Nano Thermal Interface, Thermal Ground Plane and Dual Cool Jets.
Thermal Management Solutions
The most common way to cool military embedded computing systems is conduction cooling, where Waste heat moves from hot components on circuit boards to the sides of boards, through the enclosures, and out to large metal surfaces like the armor of a main battle tank, where the heat disperses to the ambient air. Conduction cooling is handy in military environments where dust, dirt, and other contaminants make it impossible to use blown air to cool hot components.
“We can use things on the edges of the board, which are the VME chassis clamps, or wedge locks,” explains Chris Ciufo the GMS chief technology officer and vice president of product marketing. Conventional wisdom has it that these clamps can handle roughly 25 Watts of waste heat. Two clamps per board, and this offers capacity to cool 50 Watts of heat per processor board. This approach only goes so far, and “people really do need to cool more than that,” Ciufo says.
For reference, the Intel Xeon E5 22-core processor, which is becoming popular for HPEC military and aerospace applications, can generate as much heat as 145 Watts, while the same processor with 14 cores generates as much as 120 Watts. It’s just too much heat for conventional VME wedge locks. “Clearly, people are finding other ways to do this,” Ciufo says.
GMS has patented a version of the VME card-edge clamp that doubles the conventional VME clamp’s capacity to from 50 Watts to 100 Watts per card. “We contact both sides of our 6U VME board, so instead of just one side of the board, we can increase the heat the clamp pushes out to the chassis,” Ciufo says. “This clamp is broken into multiple segments, which move toward each other as the screw tightens. We feed heat from more surface area on both sides of the board to the clamp.”
Reducing the processor’s heat rise can enable GMS systems designers to run the Xeon E5 processor and other high-performance chips at their maximum clock speeds. While some designers deal with thermal management by throttling-back processor clock speeds, at GMS “we can run processors at their maximum speed and heat with no compromise in reliability,” Ciufo says.
Convection cooling
Another typical way to cool embedded computing components is with fan-blown air, also called convection cooling. This approach places heat sinks with fins on hot components, and blows air over the heat sinks to remove excess heat to the ambient air. This approach can be a problem for aerospace and defense applications because shock, vibration, and air contaminants can cause system failures in convection-cooled systems. Plus, fans are notorious single-points-of-failure, so military systems designers use them only when they must.
There’s a second kind of convection cooling, however, that doesn’t use fans. It’s called natural convection cooling, which moves air by creating currents based on the temperature difference between the cooling fins and the surrounding air. Yet while at least partially solving the problems of fan reliability, natural convection cooling is limited in the amount heat it can remove. “You would not use natural convection cooling for HPEC,” says Curtiss-Wright’s Straznicky. “It’s mostly for the lower-end stuff.”
“Thermals and cooling are more and more key,” says Ram Rajan, senior vice president of engineering and research at chassis and electronics enclosure specialist Elma Electronic Inc. in Fremont, Calif. A decade or more ago the electronics cooling and thermal management challenge was relatively uncomplicated. Ruggedized systems for avionics or land vehicles featured convection cooling where fans blew heat way from hot components, or conduction cooling where processor heat flowed to card wedge locks and out through the walls of the chassis. For all but the most demanding applications, these approaches were sufficient for many years.
It’s different today, however, as embedded computing systems are higher performance, yet run far hotter, than ever before. “The trend is going away from air-cooled, and to conduction cooling and liquid cooling,” says Elma’s Rajan. Driving demands on thermal management are advanced applications such as signals intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic warfare (EW), and ever-more tight packaging for SWaP.
Liquid cooling
With increasing requirements of features and functionalities expected from modern devices in every industry, power requirements are also becoming stringent. The liquid cooling system is touted to be a next-gen solution for thermal management in electronics.
Liquid cooling for high-performance embedded systems can involve channeling liquid through small pipes that snake their way throughout processing boards or through card clamps to move heat away from card edges. Systems designers adapt their liquid cooling techniques to match the demands of their applications.
In today’s high-power HPEC applications, sometimes liquid cooling is one of only a few viable options for removing large amounts of heat. Systems designers can use a variety of liquids, ranging from jet fuel to inert liquids. “We are seeing a lot more liquid cooling these days than we did in the past,” says Shaun McQuaid, director of product management at the Mercury Systems Sensor and Mission Processing (SMP) segment in Andover, Mass. “The processing and performance requirements are pushing in that direction.”
Mercury’s McQuaid says the cooling necessary for extreme applications of 300 to 400 Watts at the board level typically requires liquid cooling. “It’s become a lot more of an available thing,” he says. “It’s not as exotic as it used to be. Technology has advanced in quick disconnects and leak-proofing to put liquid cooling in the realm of deployment.”
Because modern embedded computing architectures can generate so much heat, designers are seeing a spike in demand for liquid-cooled chassis and modules. “In the last year we have done more liquid-cooling designs than we had in the previous 20 years,” points out Elma’s Rajan. Similarly, Pixus experts plan to announce a an electronics enclosure later this year that cools hot components by running liquid through the chassis walls.
The use of liquid coolants for cooling electronics has made massive progress for the EV industry. In battery chargers, the current rating is limited by the capacity of the material to dissipate heat. As the demand for faster-charging speed in EVs is increasing, engineers have turned towards a liquid cooling system. Tesla has been using liquid coolant for charging connectors and batteries to keep them operating at safe temperatures. This has allowed them to increase their charging rate capacity.
Recently, researchers from the American Chemical Society have reported using a hydrogel to recover waste heat and reduce the temperature of electronics. To demonstrate this, they attached hydrogel to a cell phone battery during fast discharging. Part of the waste heat was converted into five μW of electricity, and the battery temperature decreased by 68 ºF. Although recovered energy seems small, it can be used for monitoring the battery or control of the cooling system.
Hybrid cooling techniques
Some of the most intriguing new developments in electronics cooling involve blends of conduction, convection, and liquid cooling. Often these hybrid approaches offer to keep costs down, as well as to capitalize on the existing electronics infrastructure available on military systems and platforms.
This is leading to new innovations in thermal management within chassis and enclosures. Two notable industry-standard hybrid cooling approaches are ANSI/VITA 48.8 Air Flow Through (AFT) cooling, and ANSI/VITA 48.7 Air Flow-By cooling. Both approaches are for 3U and 6U VPX plug-in embedded computing boards. AFT cooling was pioneered by Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions and Northrop Grumman Corp., while Air Flow-By cooling started at Mercury Systems. AFT offers cooling capacity of as much as 200 Watts per card slot to support high-power embedded computing applications like sensor processing; it’s environmentally sealed to accommodate harsh military operating conditions. AFT passes air through the chassis heat frame, preventing the ambient air from contacting the electronics, but decreasing the thermal path to the cooling air dramatically, Curtiss-Wright officials say.
A gasket mounted inside the chassis seals the card’s internal air passage to the chassis side walls, and shields the internal electronics from the blown air. Each card has an isolated thermal path, rather than sharing cooling air among several cards. Air Flow-By maintains the card’s standard 1-inch pitch, and offers a 25-percent reduction in processor temperature for dual Intel Xeon processors; a 33-percent increase in processor frequency at that reduced temperature; five times increase in mean times between failures (MTBF); and a 25-percent reduction in weight of the processor module, according to Mercury.
Elma’s Rajan says these approaches historically have been for niche aerospace and defense applications, or for test-and-development chassis products. “Compared even to five years ago, the cooling requirements have jumped up significantly because of the higher-Wattage boards,” explains Justin Moll, vice president of sales and marketing at Pixus Technologies in Waterloo, Ontario. “Now we need to cool in an air-cooled chassis maybe 2,000 to 2,500 Watts — and in some cases our customers want these to be in rugged deployable chassis.” There was a time not long ago when this kind of cooling capability came only in chassis intended for benign environments, but not so today. “One thing that is changing is people want that kind of performance in the rugged chassis, as well,” Moll says.
New Technologies for Thermal management
In recent years, novel approaches to enhancement of both two-phase (boiling and/or condensation) and air-side heat transfer that have been inspired by modern active and passive flow control technologies have been developed at Georgia Tech and have shown significant performance improvements in a range of controlled experiments. Two-phase heat transfer involving boiling and condensation in a liquid pool (in the presence and absence of forced convection) is prevalent in high-density electronics because of its potential to enable high heat fluxes in relatively small volumes and using relatively simple hardware.
However, coupling to the system-level heat transfer of this attractive heat transfer approach is hampered by the dynamics of both vapor formation and condensation. Vapor formation is restricted by the critical heat flux (CHF) limit on the maximum heat transfer during vapor formation owing to the dynamics of the vapor bubbles that form on the heated surface, while vapor condensation is normally limited by the subcooled temperature of the embedding fluid and the diffusion-convection heat transfer at the liquid vapor interface vapor bubbles.
The investigations at Georgia Tech have shown substantial two-phase heat transfer enhancement by independent control and regulation of vapor formation, and by augmenting vapor condensation using lowpower acoustic actuation of the liquid-gas interface. It is shown that acoustic actuation greatly extends the critical heat flux limit and provides for control of vapor bubble generation rate and advection, and independently can accelerate the rate of direct contact vapor condensation. Both approaches enable reduction in the required volume of subcooled liquid, as well as the overall system dimensions.
Heat transport by air convection (forced or natural) from heated surface (e.g., air cooled heat exchangers) is typically limited by the heat transfer coefficient and mixing with the air stream especially. In most cases, these systems operate at low Reynolds numbers to minimize flow losses and cooling power at the cost of nearly-laminar, and therefore less effective, heat transfer. The investigations at Georgia Tech have demonstrated that heat transfer at the surface and in the bulk stream can be radically enhanced by deliberate formation and advection of small-scale flow motions by harnessing mechanical energy from the embedding flow to drive aeroelastic flutter of simple self-oscillating reeds. Such small-scale heat transfer enhancement by passive reeds was demonstrated in air-cooled heated ducts at with significant heat transfer enhancement and only a slight increase in the channel pressure drop.
Design transformation
The challenges of hybrid and liquid cooling for embedded computing systems are encouraging systems designers to question some of the fundamental chassis and enclosure design issues as seek to find the most efficient solutions for cooling super-heated systems, as well as to accommodate rapid systems upgrades and technology insertion.
Sealander says Curtiss-Wright is in the initial stages of devising a single-card design that accommodates a wide variety of cooling methodologies, and places the difficult burden of thermal management into the chassis and enclosure. “Rather than designing how the card is cooled, we could put the complexity into the enclosure itself,” Sealander says. “The cooling fluid itself could be air, or liquid — both are viable for pulling heat off cards.”
This approach could enable embedded computing designers to change card designs quickly to meet customer demands, while using enclosure and chassis.
This ATR chassis is an example of the high amount of I/O that one box had to accommodate. The unit is about the size of a half-ATR box.
designs that could change slowly and accommodate new card designs rapidly. “The enclosure part of the infrastructure could change slowly: the metal box and the cabling. That is where the need is. The electronics is changing quickly, and if we don’t want to keep fighting against it, we want to adapt at the speed of technology. With natural conduction or forced-air convection, the cards all have to be different. We are working toward a single card design to take advantage of advanced cooling.”
Reversing power flow in LEDs could provide new way of cooling for electronics thermal management
Researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., reversed the electrodes of an infrared LED to take advantage of a little-known physical phenomenon: LEDs with this reverse-bias trick behave as if they were at a lower temperature, which could provide a new way of controlling heat in electronics.
LEDs can absorb infrared light from nearby objects, thereby cooling them, if the LED is as close as only tens of nanometers. At this close proximity, a photon that would not have escaped the object to be cooled can pass into the LED, almost as if the gap between them did not exist, university researchers explain.
There’s some way to go before the technology is ready for commercialization, but it could prove usable for quickly drawing heat away from future processors in small-form-factor devices like future wearable computing and smart phones. Supporting this research are officials of the U.S. Army Research Office in Research Triangle Park, N.C., and the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington.
US Army’s Cooling System Collaboration
The Army’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center — known as C5ISR Center — began working with the University of Maryland in April 2019 as part of a three-year effort with three phases. The university is developing advanced cooling technologies that will prevent excessive heat produced by military technologies from damaging sensitive electronic components. The technologies and methodologies used to dissipate heat produced by electronics are collectively known as thermal management, said Dr. Terry DuBois, a senior research engineer for the C5ISR Center.
Thermal management plays a significant and growing role in the design and function of electronics, particularly as the use of electronic warfare systems and directed energy expands. Directed energy is the use of electric power for offensive and defensive applications, including lasers and high-powered microwaves.
“Microelectronic component powers have risen by a factor of 100 over the past 20 years, with an accompanying increase in heat flux,” said Dr. Raphael K. Mandel, assistant director of the University of Maryland’s Smart and Small Thermal Systems Laboratory. “The traditional approaches using natural convection and forced-air cooling are becoming less viable as power levels increase. We’re focused on a liquid refrigerant as the best approach to achieve the necessary cooling capacity.”
Thermal management is a cross-cutting capability applicable to many military platforms and Department of Defense research projects, DuBois said. The combined research and development efforts will be applied to the Army’s Future Vertical Lift program, or FVL, one of the service’s top six modernization priorities, DuBois said. Knowledge gained will transition to FVL as requirements for electronic warfare/survivability equipment are developed.
“Through this partnership with the University of Maryland, we’re focused on addressing high thermal pulse applications, as critical components cannot function under large temperature fluctuations,” DuBois said. “As the systems get smaller, the challenge gets much bigger. Heat intensity, when operating very close to the electronic component, could approach the same intensity as the surface of the sun.” Leveraging specialized expertise from academia is essential to solve the Army’s most difficult technological challenges, said Beth Ferry, chief of the C5ISR Center’s Power Division.
Thermal Management Market
Thermal Management Market Is Expected To Grow From USD 11.1 Billion In 2019 To USD 16.2 Billion By 2024, At A CAGR Of 8.0%. Major factors driving the thermal management market include the rising demand for effective thermal management solutions & systems in consumer electronics, increasing use of electronic devices in different end-use industries, and ongoing radical miniaturization of electronic devices. Further, the amount of heat generated from automobiles through engine, battery, brake, and lighting gives rise to the necessity of integrating proper thermal solutions.
Thermal management hardware is expected to remain the leading segment over the next eight years owing to the increase in the production of miniaturized microprocessors. The hardware product segment has benefited significantly from the increased implementation of heat removal solutions in high-volume commodity systems. A major portion of products in the hardware segment has matured in the growing electronic applications market. Industrialists are increasingly concerned about reducing the energy consumption and carbon footprints of facilities and enhancing their operational efficiency.
Thermal management interface products are estimated to witness significant growth over the forecast period. The growth in this segment can be attributed to the increasing implementation of interfaces in the automated assembly. These interfaces are regarded as the key heat dissipation solutions for portable and compact electronic devices. The smartphone and the tablet material market have witnessed considerable growth in the past decade. Owing to the sensitivity towards the weight and the costs, these markets are envisioned to rely largely on advanced materials for cooling solutions rather than secondary heat sinks.
“The nonadhesive thermal management material market is expected to hold the largest share during the forecast period”
Nonadhesive materials such as thermal pads, gap fillers, and grease are used widely in consumer electronics such as computers, laptops, and other handheld devices such as tablets. Thermal pads are used to fill the gaps between heat sinks and microprocessors. They eliminate air gaps to reduce thermal resistance and provide low-stress vibration dampening. Elastomeric pads were developed as an alternative to grease-based solutions used earlier for thermal management.
“The convection cooling devices is expected to hold the largest share of the thermal management market during the forecast period”
Convection cooling devices are increasingly being used in electronic components, electronic circuits, and PCBs. These devices help lower the peak temperature of different systems wherein they are installed with natural and forced convection cooling technologies. Devices such as loop heat pipes, heat pumps, heat sinks, and heat spreaders are used for effective cooling of processors and computers, among others.
The chip-cooling solutions have evolved over the past few years to accommodate the increase in heat flux. Manufacturers are working on the development of advanced cooling solutions based on multi-phase heat transfer technologies. Technologies, such as jet impingement mechanisms, cold plates, and heat vapor chambers, have revolutionized the future of these systems.
However, various components and system-level technological issues, such as heat effect on transistor operation, spatial and temporal variation in the heat load, multiple heat transfer interface, and acoustic noise emissions, are presumed to challenge technological advancements. These challenges are expected to impact market growth negatively over the forecast period.
“The market for the automotive industry is expected to witness the highest growth from 2019 to 2024”
The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increasing demand for thermal management solutions and systems in automobiles, owing to the downsizing of their engines to improve their fuel efficiency. Moreover, the deployment of navigation systems, dashboard displays, audio systems, etc. in automobiles is also increasing the consumption of battery power. Excessive use of batteries generates heat, which needs to be dissipated through proper conduction and shielding. Hence, thermal management of batteries is critical to maintain the safety standards and improve the overall life of automobiles.
Automotive electronics are expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period owing to the rising complexity, value, and quantity of electronics in the passenger as well as the commercial heavy-duty vehicles. This rise has led to the development of advanced products that offer adequate heat dissipation, grounding, and shielding to the components, as well as the equipment. The development of electric vehicles has driven the need for heat removal in electric motors. Heat dissipation is presumed to be a critical factor in the efficient vehicle development processes due to the stringent federal legislation for the reduction of air conditioning fuel over-consumption and efficient dissipation of waste heat.
Optimization & post-sales support: The largest and fastest growing segment of thermal management market, by service.
Optimization & post-sales support segment is estimated to be the fastest growing segment of the thermal management market, by service.Optimization & post-sales support services are required periodically to verify the operating conditions, reduce downtime of systems, elevate their overall performance levels, and maximize their operational life and efficiency. These services are generally used as a critical quality control tool in servers & data centers as high temperatures can damage them and can result in loss of the vital information.
“APAC is likely to witness the highest growth during the forecast period”
The region has emerged as a global focal point for large investments and business expansion opportunities. Moreover, increasing demand for effective thermal management solutions and systems from consumer electronics, automotive, defense, and healthcare sectors is also fueling the growth of the thermal management market in APAC. Flourishing chip manufacturing companies in countries such as China and South Korea are contributing to the growth of the thermal management market in APAC. The region holds a major position in the global semiconductor chip manufacturing industry with China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to this, increasing government initiatives promoting the adoption of renewable energy sources, such as solar cells, are presumed to drive the regional industry in the coming years.
Europe is expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period owing to its compliance with stringent EU regulations and directives about the usage of thermal interface materials in various electronic devices. The increased awareness among the regional population regarding the environment is predicted to boost the adoption of eco-friendly heat management solutions across various applications. The region encompasses several advanced electronic designing and R&D facilities in countries, such as Germany and the UK, which in turn is presumed to boost the adoption of these technologies in the region.
The key companies include LairdTech, Pentair Thermal Management, Thermal Management Technologies, Advanced Cooling Technologies, Thermacore, Dau Thermal Solutions, Heatex, Momentive Performance Materials, Honeywell International (US), Sapa Group, Alcatel-Lucent, and Aavid Thermalloy LLC. (US), Vertiv Co. (US), European Thermodynamics Ltd. (UK), and Master Bond Inc. (US).
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