AVS 51st International Symposium
    Manufacturing Science and Technology Tuesday Sessions
       Session MS-TuP

Paper MS-TuP12
Field Emission Enhanced Semiconductor Thermoelectric Cooler

Tuesday, November 16, 2004, 4:00 pm, Room Exhibit Hall B

Session: Poster Session
Presenter: B.L. Weiss, The Pennsylvania State University
Authors: B.L. Weiss, The Pennsylvania State University
P.H. Cutler, The Pennsylvania State University
N.M. Miskovsky, The Pennsylvania State University
M. Chung, University of Ulsan, South Korea
N. Kumar, UHV Technologies
Correspondent: Click to Email
We report the initial experimental results of the fabrication and measurements of a prototype field emission enhanced thermoelectric cooler device. The device is designed for applications in microelectronics, and operating from ambient to cryogenic temperatures. The device is fabricated using CVD deposited wide band gap (diamond and III-V nitrides) thin films. Cooling measurements are carried out in a UHV system using both thermocouple and optical thermometry. This work is motivated by a recent theoretical analysis of an efficient, compact, low power consumption thermoelectric cooler by Chung et. al. @footnote 1@. The new paradigm involves cooling via electron field emission from wide band gap materials which is based on a corrected theory@footnote 2@ of the Nottingham effect @footnote 3@ with calculated cooling rates of up to 100 W/cm@super 2@ or better. The thermoelectric cooler device proposed here uses an electric field modulated current to transport energy (i.e., heat) from a cold source to a hot source via n- and p-type carriers. This device is fabricated by combining the standard n- and p-channel solid-state thermoelectric cooler with a two-element vacuum field emission device inserted into each of the two channels which introduces an essentially infinite thermal resistance for lattice heat conduction. In the proposed cooler, the heat removed from the cold source is the average energy difference of the field emitted electrons from the n-type and p-type semiconductors. The theory predicts the average energy removed (cooling rate) increases with decreasing doping concentration and with increasing local field at the emitter surface. With typical values of doping and field, the cooling rates exceed those of standard thermoelectric coolers. The cooling device is shown to have an energy transport (i.e., heat) per electron of up to 500 meV depending on concentration and field while, in good thermoelectric coolers, it is about 50-60 meV at room temperature.} $Footnotes {@footnote 1@ Moon Chung, P.H. Cutler, N.M. Miskovsky, Nalin Kumar and V. Patel,Solid-State Electronics, 47 1745-1751, 2003. @footnote 2@ Moon Chung, P.H. Cutler, N.M. Miskovsky and T.E. Sullivan,J Vac Sci Technol B;12(2),727-36, 1994. @footnote 3@ W.B. Nottingham Phys. Rev, 59, 907, 1941.