Thermal Management Roadmap for Energy Efficient Next Generation Telecommunications Equipment

The network traffic in telecommunication industry has grown very rapidly every year since its inception. As projected, the network traffic demand will reach tens or hundreds of Tb/s in a couple of years. With the extrapolation from current equipment, future nodes would consume and dissipate up to 100's of kilowatts of power. In response to the projected growth, new design and architecture are needed in order to face the power-density challenges in the next generation telecommunication networks. There are two aspects of these issues. One is the network architecture and another is telecommunication equipment design. The thermal management of latter case is the focus of this paper.