  We review recently developed new powerful techniques to compute a class of
Feynman diagrams at any loop order, known as sunrise-type diagrams. These
sunrise-type topologies have many important applications in many different
fields of physics and we believe it to be timely to discuss their evaluation
from a unified point of view. The method is based on the analysis of the
diagrams directly in configuration space which, in the case of the sunrise-type
diagrams and diagrams related to them, leads to enormous simplifications as
compared to the traditional evaluation of loops in momentum space. We present
explicit formulae for their analytical evaluation for arbitrary mass
configurations and arbitrary dimensions at any loop order. We discuss several
limiting cases of their kinematical regimes which are e.g. relevant for
applications in HQET and NRQCD.
