Thin-film Thermoelectric Technology
Thin films are thin material layers ranging from fractions of a nanometer to several micrometers in thickness. Thin-film thermoelectric materials are grown by conventional semiconductor deposition methods and fabricated using conventional semiconductor micro-fabrication techniques.
Thin-film thermoelectrics have been demonstrated to provide high heat pumping capacity that far exceeds the capacities provided by traditional bulk pellet TE products. The benefit of thin-films versus bulk materials for thermoelectric manufacturing is expressed in Equation 1. Here the Qmax (maximum heat pumped by a module) is shown to be inversely proportional to the thickness of the film, L.
Eq. 1
As such, TE coolers manufactured with thin-films can easily have 10x – 20x higher Qmax values for a given active area A. This makes thin-film TECs ideally suited for applications involving high heat-flux flows. In addition to the increased heat pumping capability, the use of thin films allows for truly novel implementation of TE devices. Instead of a bulk module that is 1-3 mm in thickness, a thin-film TEC can be fabricated less than 100 um in thickness.
In its simplest form, the P or N leg of a TE couple (the basic building block of all thin-film TE devices) is a layer of thin-film TE material with a solder layer above and below, providing electrical and thermal functionality.
Read more about this topic: Thermal Copper Pillar Bump
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)