RTC Conference and Expo 2025 – 7-8 October 2025 The IIT RTC Conference and Expo is a globally recognized collaborative event, where industry and academia connect. Leveraging its unique academic setting, this annual conference brings together software developers, network engineers, entrepreneurs, business executives, students, and academic educators and researchers to promote an open exchange of ideas to lead future development in the rapidly changing field of real-time communications. Conference Co-Hosts: (https://ieeechicago.org/) & (http://cs.iit.edu/~rtc/) Co-sponsored by: IEEE REAL-TIME COMMUNICATIONS LAB Agenda: The presentations and demonstrations are organized into the following tracks: - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#researchtrack) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#programmabletelecomapplications) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#voicetech) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#webrtc) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#nextgen) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#emergingtech) - (https://www.rtc-conference.com/2025/program/#cqr) Bldg: Hermann Hall, 3241 S Federal St , Chicago, Illinois, United States, 60616

The history of modern computing has been shaped as much by advances in thermal management as by improvements in semiconductor design. From the early days of the IBM PC, where processors dissipated only a few watts and required no active cooling, to today’s graphics processing units (GPUs) exceeding 1,000 W per chip, the demand for efficient electronics cooling has steadily grown in both urgency and complexity. This presentation provides a historical perspective on the evolution of thermal solutions for central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, including the adoption of pin-fin heat sinks, forced convection, thermoelectric coolers, heat pipes, and vapor chambers. It further explores the growing challenges introduced by laptop and server designs, as well as the hierarchical nature of electronics packaging, which introduces non-uniform power dissipation, hot spots, and increasingly stringent junction- temperature limits. In addition to reviewing classical approaches, the presentation highlights the transition into the post-Moore’s Law era, where computational power has grown not by simple transistor scaling but through massively parallel architectures and accelerated computing. This shift has driven unprecedented power density, requiring new generations of cooling technologies, from advanced liquid-cooling loops to two-phase solutions. Finally, the presentation outlines emerging opportunities in electronics cooling across diverse domains, including AI data centers, telecommunications, automotive power electronics, electric- vehicle battery systems, LEDs, and renewable energy. By examining the trajectory of thermal management from past to future, this talk emphasizes the central role of cooling innovations in enabling continued progress in high-performance computing and sustainable electronics. Co-sponsored by: Marquette University Speaker(s): Winston Zhang Room: 202, Bldg: Olin, 1511 W Wisconsin Ave, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States