Creation of a Thermal Technology Roadmap in a Consumer Electronics Product Environment

Thermal issues and problems of a product are emerging very early in the Product Creation Process (PCP). Innovation, Time to market and Cost are three important drivers of the consumer electronics market. While costs of changes exponentially increase during the product development cycle, the freedom to implement changes substantially diminishes. It is therefore important to identify very early in the PCP the thermal risks and associate to them possible cooling technologies or strategies. A Thermal Technology Roadmap (TTR) can lead to better strategic choices; it is a decision tool for long term investments in pre-development, it enables getting a common long term vision within the organization and it enables synergy between research centers and product development teams. This publication describes a methodology developed to create a Thermal Technology Roadmap (TTR) associating a product roadmap to emerging technologies. The resulting TTR identifies the most promising cooling technologies for the product range on short, middle and long terms according to defined criteria.