Thermal management in mobile devices: challenges and solutions

Mobile devices have wide functionality nowadays. The functionality of these devices is expected to be improved and expanded. However, to be able to accomplish this, power dissipation in the form of heat from major chips namely the processor, Wi-Fi, and PMU will increase. This will impose major thermal management challenges because the nature of thermal solutions in mobile devices depends on different factors such as: device dimensions (thickness), mechanical tolerances within the device, limitations on the skin temperature of the device, and electrical architecture. In this paper, a state-of-the-art description of these challenges is presented. Also, some of the considerations in the thermal design are discussed.