Heating element and supporting circuitry for adapting a nominally rated semiconductor chip to an extremely cold environment

A machine readable storage medium containing program code that when processed by an embedded processor of a power management integrated circuit causes the power management integrated circuit to perform a method, comprising:

• determine that a semiconductor chip's temperature is below its rated operating temperature range and, in response thereto, enable a heating element embedded in an electronic circuit board that the semiconductor chip is disposed on;
• monitor the temperature of the semiconductor chip while the heating element is generating heat;
• and,
• disable the heating element in response to the semiconductor chip's temperature having reached the rated operating temperature range.