Engineering360: "Method to Dissipate Heat in Electronic Devices"

Back in my short flirtation with EE, in EE 101 lab, we did our first breadboard, consisting of about 15 components. What a sloppy mess. It looked so neat and clean on paper. Instead of going on to the next circuit, the prof said. ''OK, clean it up and do it again, making your second try more conspicuously efficient.''

Having zero social life that year, I sweated it over a weekend to redo the circuit in a very tedious and painful cut and paste of breadboard pieces to make the circuit in three vertical breadboard tiers. By appearance (e. g., the planes of the three levels were significantly tilted compared to each other and horizontal), it was uglier than my first single plane breadboard.

But it got the prof's attention...and a lot of laughs at my expense. I was commended for an effort that had no relevance to the real world of (electronic) circuits: The bottom line was, if for no other reason, such 3D circuits were ultimately constrained by heating.

Decades later, it seems we are still up against the heat issue for 3D, even if additive manufacturing may be able to build compact fully integrated 3D electrical/electronic colossi.