Paper EM-TuP21
Fabrication of Multilayer Thin Film Micro-Cooling Devices

Tuesday, November 10, 2009, 6:00 pm, Room Hall 3

Solid state thermoelectric cooling devices have been of current interest for hot-spot thermal management. Cooling hot-spots with high heat flux is becoming one of the most important technical challenges facing today’s IC industry. The rising temperature limits device minimization and decreases its lifetime. In this paper, we report to fabricate in-plane and cross-plane solid-state thermoelectric cooling devices using multilayered Bi₂Te₃/Sb₂Te₃ and Bi₂Te₃/Bi₂Te_3-xSe_x thin films. The Bi₂Te₃/Sb₂Te₃ and Bi₂Te₃/Bi₂Te_3-xSe_x multilayer thin films were deposited using sputtering deposition. The Bi₂Te₃/Sb₂Te₃ and Bi₂Te₃/Bi₂Te_3-xSe_x multilayer thin films have a periodic structure consisting of alternating Bi₂Te₃ and Sb₂Te₃ layers or Bi₂Te₃ and Bi₂Te_3-xSe_x layers, where each layer is about 10 nm thick. The films were analyzed by XRD and SEM. The devices were fabricated using the standard integrated circuit (IC) fabrication process; pn junction diodes were fabricated as thermometers for the measurement of temperature in the devices. The fabricated in-plane and cross-plane multilayer thin film cooling devices and the achieved temperature difference from the cooling devices will be reported in the Conference. The developed devices could be a good candidate for the application of high-efficiency solid-state micro-cooling.