The continuing trend in the electronics market for lightweight and more powerful applications has lead to increased thermal management issues in these devices, both at the chip level and the overall system level. For example, in one such instance layers of printed circuit boards (PCBs) containing power-electronics circuitry are stacked on top of each other in a compact external module. This means that the heat cannot be discarded vertically from an individual PCB and has to be carried laterally to the edge of the board before it can be dumped to an external heat sink. In this scenario, standard thermal management solutions such as "conduction" prove to be very inefficient since the coefficient of thermal conductivity is finite, the heat flow cross-section is extremely small (very thin metal layer), while the heat has to moved a considerable distance to the external heat sink.

Heat pipes, loop heat pipes and capillary pumped loops belong to a class of passive, lliquid-phase-change, heat transporting devices which provide a very high effective thermal conductivity. This is possible due to the fact that boiling can provide very large convective heat transfer coefficients whereas liquid surface tension enables capillary forces which circulate the working fluid in a loop from the vaporization zone to the condensation zone and back. Loop heat pipes are especially suited to transporting large amounts of heat over long distances at very low temperature differentials. Despite these advantages, typically loop heat pipes are bulky devices fabricated out of cylindrical tubing and also do not provide a flat vaporization surface for efficient interfacing with mostly planar electronic components.