Thermionic cooling of optoelectronic and microelectronic devices

Authors

S. P. Lee, University of WollongongFollow
B. C. Lough, University of WollongongFollow
R. A. Lewis, University of WollongongFollow
C. Zhang, University of WollongongFollow

RIS ID

15083

Publication Details

This paper originally appeared as: Lee, SP, Lough, BC, Lewis, RA & Zhang, C, Thermionic cooling of optoelectronic and microelectronic devices, COMMAD 2000. Proceedings Conference on Optoelectronic and Microelectronic Materials and Devices, 6-8 December 2000, 415-418. Copyright IEEE 2000.

Abstract

Solid-state thermionic cooling has gained attention recently because of its potential high cooling power. Thermionic devices based on semiconductor heterostructures utilize the band-edge offset at a heterojunction as the thermionic emission potential barrier and a thin layer to separate the cold and hot junction. In this paper, we present the behavior of thermionic coolers with periodic barriers using gallium arsenide/aluminium gallium arsenide (GaAs/Al/sub x/Ga/sub 1-x/As) semiconductor heterostructures. The exact numerical calculation to model the device performance has shown that the thermal efficiency in a multilayer structure is optimised when the effect of phonon scattering is introduced in the model. Besides, the thermal efficiency depends critically on applied bias.