The inexorable rise in chip power dissipation and emergence of on-chip hot spots with heat fluxes approaching 1 =kW/cm/sup 2/ has turned renewed attention to direct cooling with dielectric liquids. Use of dielectric liquids in intimate contact with the heat dissipating surfaces eliminates the deleterious effects of solid-solid interface resistances and harnesses the highly efficient phase-change processes to the critical thermal management of advanced IC chips. In the interest of defining the state-of-the-art in direct liquid cooling, this paper begins with a discussion of the thermophysics of phase-change processes and a description of the available dielectric liquid cooling techniques and their history. It then describes the phenomenology of pool boiling, spray/jet impingement, gas-assisted evaporation, and synthetic jet impingement with dielectric liquids. Available correlations for predicting the heat transfer coefficients and limiting heat transfer rates, as well as documented empirical results for these promising techniques for on-chip hot spot cooling, are also provided and compared.