A review of active cooling technologies for electronic thermal management

Modern high-performance electronic systems continuously generate large amounts of heat within confined spaces. Insufficient heat dissipation can lead to performance degradation, reduced reliability, or even failure. Therefore, establishing an efficient and controllable thermal management system has become a key factor constraining the continued evolution of electronic technologies. Traditional passive cooling approaches relying on natural convection and heat conduction have gradually approached their theoretical and engineering limits and can no longer meet the temperature-control requirements of next-generation devices. Against this backdrop, active cooling technologies that introduce external energy input to enhance fluid transport and heat transfer have emerged as an important development direction for overcoming the bottlenecks of passive cooling. This work systematically examines recent advances in active cooling for electronic thermal management, covering active air cooling, active liquid cooling, including cold plates, microchannels, jet impingement, and immersion cooling, spray cooling, thermoelectric cooling, and emerging active cooling technologies. It adopts a more unified, system-oriented perspective to compare these routes in terms of cooling capability, energy efficiency, structural complexity, reliability and maintenance, and target applications. This work further emphasizes engineering-relevant metrics, including thermal resistance, pressure drop or pumping power, heat removed per unit auxiliary power, and route-dependent system-level indicators, while distinguishing chip/package-level cooling enhancement from rack- and facility-level heat-rejection penalties. It also identifies shared bottlenecks related to auxiliary-energy demand, manufacturability, flow and phase-change stability, long-term reliability, and broader sustainability trade-offs, and highlights future priorities toward multi-mechanism synergy, integrated multiscale design, and AI-assisted design and intelligent control.