Thermoelectric coolers: Infinite potentials for finite localized microchip cooling

doi:10.1016/j.jmst.2021.12.069

Abstract

Abstract:

With the ever-growing semiconductor and microchip industries, increasing amount and categories of personal electronics have flooded into our daily life. Overheating is the key challenge limiting further performance enhancement of the high-speed microchips in electronics. Thermoelectric cooling, a solid-state active cooling method, possesses great potential for localized cooling with the advantages of noise-free, vibration-free, maintenance-free, and liquid-media-free, and can solve the challenge in microchips. By proper material engineering, such as carrier concentration, band engineering, hierarchical architecture engineering, high performance thermoelectric materials with high potential for thermoelectric cooling have been widely developed. Through further proper device design based on state-of-art thermoelectric materials, such as vertical thin film thermoelectric device design, contact interface engineering and thermoelectric and microchip integration, thermoelectric coolers show infinite potentials for finite cooling requirement of microchips.

Key words: Microchip, Cooling, Thermoelectric, Application

Zhi-Gang Chen, Wei-Di Liu. Thermoelectric coolers: Infinite potentials for finite localized microchip cooling[J]. J. Mater. Sci. Technol., 2022, 121: 256-262.

Figures/Tables 5

Fig. 1. (a) Schematic diagram showing key element for electronic devices are microchips, which are composed of condensed transistor formed integrated circuits. (b) Number of transistor-counts per microchip as a function of released years. (c) Number of transistor density per microelectronic chip as a function of released years.

Fig. 2. (a) Schematic diagram of a thermoelectric cooler composed of p-n junctions connected in series functioning under an external power source. (b) Schematic diagram presents the mechanism of heat transfer from cold side to hot side of a p-n junction under an external power supply.

Fig. 3. Relationship between cooling COP and the hot- and cold-side temperature difference (ΔT) of a Peltier cooler in comparison with the vapor compression cycle refrigerating, where the hot-side temperature is set at 300 K.

Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of typical thermoelectric cooler performance engineering strategies: (a) Fermi level (EF) optimization for thermoelectric material dimensionless figure of merit (T) enhancement, where CB is short for conduction band and VB is short for Valence band, (b) hierarchical architecture engineering introducing structure defects of various scales (such as point defects, nano precipitates, grain boundaries, interfaces etc.) for full-wavelength phonon scattering to achieve low material lattice thermal conductivity, (c) thermoelectric leg geometry design for thermoelectric cooler performance optimization [58] (Copyright, 2018 Wiley Library [58]) and (d) joint layer design for low contact electrical and thermal resistance of thermoelectric coolers [59]. (Copyright, 2011 Elsevier [59].).

Fig. 5. (a) Temperature difference generated by a bulk Sn0.91Pb0.09Se-based thermoelectric device composed of 31 pairs of p-n junctions, compared with the Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3-device, where both n-type legs are commercial Bi2Te3-based ones. (Copyright, 2021 Science, distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License [1].) (b) Temperature difference of a bulk single-leg Sn0.91Pb0.09Se-based thermoelectric device as a function of current in comparison with commercial Bi0.5Sb1.5Te3- and SnTe-based devices while used for cooling, where inset is the Photograph [1]. (Copyright, 2021 Science, distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License [1].) (c) Schematic diagram of a typical thin-film thermoelectric device, including the thermoelectric arrays, a dielectric layer and integrated heat spreader, corresponding (d) photograph and (e) cooling performance indicated by the hot-spot temperature [60]. (Copyright, 2009 Nature Springer [60].).

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