The last decade has seen a continual growth in the size and complexity of cooling solutions for mainstream personal computers. Natural CMOS scaling trends, and the competitive nature of the electronics industry, have been the twin drivers of this aggressive cooling technology trend. Every 18 months a new silicon processing node is developed, which doubles the number of transistors that can be packed into a given sized die. Although these new transistors are half the area of the ones they replace, they are faster and have a higher capacitance density. The end result is an exponential power scaling trend with a doubling of power every few years. This trend is clearly evident in Central Processing Units (CPUs), where the power has increased roughly 10x in a decade. The same exponential power-growth trend is also showing up in graphics processor chips (GPUs), where recent high-end products sport dual-slot cooling solutions with heatpipes, fans, and ducted airflow.@footnote 1@ Although at first glance the roughly 10x per decade power-scaling trend would seem to signal impending disaster, a reduction in the performance vs. time ramp can immediately stop the power ramp. Market forces will be the deciding factor in setting the future power vs. time ramp. Integrated circuit manufacturers will have to plan their future performance ramp carefully to ensure the ramp is economically sustainable. Since the future performance trend will be limited largely by the capability and affordability of the cooling technology, integrated circuit cooling has taken on a profoundly strategic importance. Since exponentially shrinking the flagship die-area is an obvious means of stopping the future power ramp, even a constant power vs. time is likely to present a serious cooling challenge. A fixed power limit combined with steadily shrinking die sizes results in steadily increasing power density. Such a trend presents an obvious materials challenge, or perhaps a strategic opportunity - depending on one's point of view. This paper explores the underlying silicon scaling trends driving the increasingly important field of integrated circuit cooling. Since increasingly difficult and costly cooling will change the underlying scaling trends, altered scaling scenarios are also studied. These altered scaling studies are not intended to be an exhaustive optimization, but rather to explore sensitivity or likely range of difficulty a materials scientist might expect to face in the future. It is hoped this will set the stage for following papers, which delve deeper into actual cooling materials science. @FootnoteText@@footnote 1@http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/geforce_6800-05.html