{"slug": "advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge", "title": "Advanced Cooling Technologies Address the Automotive Heat Challenge", "summary": "Advanced cooling technologies are needed as modern vehicles with electric drivetrains, ADAS, and AI processors generate heat fluxes that challenge traditional cooling architectures, according to an article from EE Times. The transition from 400V to 800V architectures and the use of wide-bandgap materials like gallium nitride and silicon carbide increase efficiency but still require thermal management. Solutions include hybrid bonding, direct liquid-to-chip cooling, and vapor chambers with TPMS structures to handle higher heat fluxes.", "body_md": "Historically, vehicle cooling architectures were engineered almost exclusively around internal combustion engines (ICE), cabin climate controls, and basic electrical systems. This traditional paradigm is evolving rapidly as modern vehicle architectures become increasingly electrified and software-defined. The simultaneous rise of electric drivetrains, advanced driver-assistance features (ADAS), self-driving platforms, and high-performance central processing units has increased thermal demands throughout modern vehicles beyond what many legacy cooling architectures were designed to accommodate.\n\nBatteries, traction inverters, charging systems, LiDAR sensors, cameras, and AI processors all generate heat that must be managed within increasingly compact spaces. These additions are creating heat fluxes that are beginning to challenge traditional cooling approaches (**Figure 1**). The industry requires innovative new cooling technologies to overcome high heat fluxes.\n\n**Automotive electronics**\n\nThe amount of electronics in internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has grown steadily for decades, with the addition of power brakes, power steering, and proximity sensors. Automakers have since added heat sensors, flow monitors, and positional sensors to monitor internal systems, along with cameras, LiDARs, and radars to support safety features such as ADAS and to enable semi-autonomous and autonomous driving. Increasingly powerful processors are necessary to orchestrate all of this, but they also generate more heat.\n\nHybrids and electric vehicles naturally expanded the complement of electronics, with electric motors, powertrains, and batteries, along with electronic power control units that must manage powertrain traction inverters, growing complements of sensors, and charging infrastructure.\n\n[View All](https://www.eetimes.com/category/sponsored-content/)\n\nThe gradual transition from 400V architectures to 800V architectures necessitates the adoption of components and power ICs based on wide-bandgap materials (WBG) such as gallium nitride and silicon carbide, both of which will switch faster, operate efficiently at higher voltages, and reduce electrical losses. However, the remaining heat must still be managed within increasingly compact packages.\n\nAll of these components are being built into tighter spaces and are often placed next to other heat-generating systems (e.g., traction inverters, batteries), compounding the problem.\n\n**Hybrid bonding and vapor chambers**\n\nSeveral chip- and module-level technologies can help improve thermal management. One is to continue to improve the interconnect in multichip configurations through techniques such as hybrid bonding, which reduces thermal interface resistance and enables dense chip integration. Hybrid bonding is already being adopted in the manufacture of some advanced processor modules and some of the more complex multilayer memory ICs.\n\nAnother solution is the adoption of direct liquid-to-chip cooling, which brings liquid cooling closer to the primary heat source by reducing the number of thermal resistance layers between the device and the coolant.\n\nVapor chambers, already in use in some of the most advanced smartphones, can be modified to handle the significantly higher heat fluxes found in motor vehicles. Although a vapor chamber occupies a relatively small footprint, it spreads heat well beyond the dimensions of the heat source. Inside the sealed chamber, heat vaporizes the working fluid, allowing thermal energy to spread rapidly through the vapor before the fluid condenses and returns to the heat source via a capillary wick.\n\nThe goal is to improve the performance of vapor chambers for the levels of heat flux encountered in automotive electronics. One approach is to expand the effective heat-transfer surface area by constructing small, uniform, and triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures. TPMS structures increase the effective heat transfer surface when compared to planar cooling solutions such as channels. Historically, TPMS structures have been difficult to manufacture at the microscale, but that challenge is beginning to be addressed (**Figure 2**).\n\nCascaded vapor chambers with TPMS interface geometries promise to distribute loads approaching 1,000 W/cm2, a level of heat flux actively explored in research settings for WBG traction inverter devices, for example. Without advanced heat spreaders such as vapor chambers, conventional air cooling is generally limited to heat fluxes below a hundred watts per square centimeter.\n\n**A solution for axial flux motors**\n\nWhile many cooling innovations focus on semiconductor packages, similar principles can also be applied at the system level. One example is the cooling of next-generation axial flux motors. A new class of axial flux motors has recently been introduced that is significantly smaller and more power-dense than existing electric motors. Depending on the application, they may incorporate multiple rotors surrounding a common stator to increase torque output. Their compact design makes conventional cooling approaches more difficult to implement.\n\nA novel proposal combines pumped and wick flows to uniformly distribute coolant from an outer cooling ring, through the gaps between the coils, and into an inner cooling ring of the motor. Compared with conventional pumped-coolant approaches, this concept offers a simpler and potentially more effective method of distributing coolant.\n\nLooking further ahead, researchers are also exploring adaptive cooling technologies. One speculative concept stems from the recent observation that certain polymers exhibit a mechanical response to light. The idea is to build micro-orifices into coolers for logic chips (CPUs, GPUs, etc.) and cover them with light-responsive polymer layers approximately 10- to 100 microns thick. LEDs or some other light sources could selectively illuminate the polymer, causing it to either expand to allow more coolant through or contract to restrict the flow of coolant. In this manner, the polymer can be optically manipulated to direct the flow of coolant to hot spots on processors without requiring electrically actuated valves or control circuitry near the coolant.\n\nAs automotive electronics continue to increase in power density, emerging cooling technologies offer new opportunities to improve heat transfer, coolant distribution, and thermal control across a broad range of vehicle applications. Together, these advances will play an important role in enabling the next generation of electrified, software-defined, and autonomous vehicles.\n\n##### Read also:\n\n**NXP Eying Ambarella: Is It About Automotive or Edge AI?**\n\nAmbarella has quietly transformed its automotive computer-vision technology to serve edge AI applications.\n\n[Automotive Cybersecurity: AI Attack Surfaces Grow](https://www.eetimes.com/automotive-cybersecurity-ai-attack-surfaces-grow/)\n\nCybersecurity is one of the most challenging issues in the automotive industry, despite sustained efforts to develop and deploy comprehensive solutions. New categories of cyberattacks will emerge alongside new vulnerabilities as software-defined vehicles add new software platforms.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge", "canonical_source": "https://www.eetimes.com/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge/", "published_at": "2026-08-31 07:46:55+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-31 07:53:59.984873+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["EE Times", "gallium nitride", "silicon carbide"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/advanced-cooling-technologies-address-the-automotive-heat-challenge.jsonld"}}