Thermoelectric Cooling Device Based on Holey Silicon

摘要

While thermal management of advanced electronics is becoming more challenging, recent advances in thermoelectric materials are renewing interest in developing solid-state cooling devices based on the Peltier effects. In particular, a silicon nanostructure with vertically-etched holes, known as holey silicon, has attracted much attention by showing thermal conductivity anisotropy beyond the prediction of classical models without losing the excellent electrical properties or other practical attributes of silicon. Despite the potential of holey silicon as a thermoelectric material as demonstrated in the studies of fundamental properties, its impact on thermoelectric cooling or the connection of fundamental properties to device-level performance has not been studied in detail. Here, we evaluate the use of holey silicon as a thermoelectric cooling structure by combining spectral scaling models that predict the size dependent thermal transport properties with a 3D finite-element thermoelectric cooling model. Our numerical simulations demonstrate the thermoelectric cooling performance of holey silicon with a wide range of high hot spot heat flux (700 ~ 500 W/cm²). The thermoelectric cooling limits of the surface-cooler design are investigated in detail and a new embedded-cooler design with 50% more hot spot temperature reduction is proposed and discussed in detail.