Advanced thermal management technologies for high-power electronic devices: A review of passive, active, and hybrid cooling strategies, materials innovations, and AI-driven design for data-center, EV, and aerospace electronics

The rapid increase in power density in modern electronic devices has created heat removal demands that now exceed the capability of traditional air and liquid cooling, threatening performance, reliability, and operational lifetime. This review synthesizes advances in thermal management technologies for high-power electronic systems, identifying how next-generation solutions address escalating heat flux levels, which frequently reach 300–1000 watts per square centimeter in processors, power modules, and stacked chip architectures. A structured survey of passive, active, and hybrid cooling methods is presented, including microchannel and two-phase liquid cooling, phase-change media, thermoelectric cooling, microfluidic systems, nanomaterials, and intelligent thermal control. Reported results indicate that two-phase microchannel systems can dissipate more than 1000 watts per square centimeter, hybrid liquid-phase systems improve temperature uniformity by up to 60 %, and advanced heat spreaders reduce hotspot differentials to below five degrees Celsius under high loads. These performance gains improve electronic reliability by reducing thermal gradients, mitigating mechanical stress, and slowing degradation mechanisms associated with junction overheating. The review concludes that future progress will require integrating high-performance materials, manufacturing advances, and data-driven control to achieve scalable and energy-efficient thermal infrastructure. The novelty of this work lies in unifying performance benchmarking with materials and sustainability considerations and in mapping thermal technologies to specific electronic application domains. This goes beyond prior reviews by linking heat flux capability, energy overhead, and environmental impact, thereby outlining research priorities for next-generation electronics requiring compact, adaptive, and low-carbon thermal solutions. The technologies surveyed directly target thermal bottlenecks in data-center processors and GPUs, electric-vehicle power electronics, 5 G/RF power amplifiers, and aerospace and quantum/cryogenic systems. Key findings include: embedded and jet-enhanced microchannel cooling now demonstrated up to 3000 W cm⁻²; hybrid PCM–liquid and TEC–liquid architectures reducing peak junction temperature by 20–60 °C; and AI/ML-driven thermal control cutting operating energy use by 20–35 % in deployed systems.