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Boron-doped polycrystalline silicon-germanium (SiGe) thin films are grown by low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and their thermoelectric properties are characterized from 120 K to 300 K for the potential applications in integrated microscale cooling. The naturally formed grain boundaries are found to play a crucial role in determining both the charge and thermal transport properties of the films.Particularly, the grain boundaries create energy barriers for charge transport which lead to abnormal dependences of charge mobility on doping concentration and temperature. Meanwhile, the unique columnar grain structures result in remarkable thermal conductivity anisotropy with the in-plane thermal conductivities of SiGe films about 50% lower than the cross-plane values. By optimizing the growth conditions and doping level, a high figure of merit (ZT) of 0.2 for SiGe films is achieved at 300 K, which is about 100% higher than the previous record for p-type SiGe alloys, mainly due to the significant reduction in the in-plane thermal conductivity caused by nanograin boundaries. The low cost and excellent scalability of LPCVD render these high-performance SiGe films ideal candidates for thin-film thermoelectric applications.

Thermally stimulated current (TSC) spectroscopy and high-voltage back-gating measurement are utilized to study GaN buffer traps specific to AlGaN/GaN lateral heterojunction structures grown on a low-resistivity Si substrate. Three dominating deep-level traps in GaN buffer with activation energies of ΔET1 ∼ 0.54 eV, ΔET2 ∼ 0.65 eV, and ΔET3 ∼ 0.75 eV are extracted from TSC spectroscopy in a vertical GaN-on-Si structure. High back-gate bias applied to the Si substrate could influence the drain current in an AlGaN/GaN-on-Si high-electron-mobility transistor in a way that cannot be explained with a simple field-effect model. By correlating the trap states identified in TSC with the back-gating measurement results, it is proposed that the ionization/deionization of both donor and acceptor traps are responsible for the generation of buffer space charges, which impose additional modulation to the 2DEG channel.