Extraction of temperature dependent electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity from silicon microwires self-heated to melting temperature

Abstract

Temperature-dependent electrical resistivity, q(T), and thermal conductivity, k(T), of nanocrystalline silicon microwires self-heated to melt are extracted by matching simulated current-voltage (I-V) characteristics to experimental I-V characteristics. Electrical resistivity is extracted from highly doped p-type wires on silicon dioxide in which the heat losses are predominantly to the substrate and the self-heating depends mainly on q(T) of the wires. The extracted q(T) decreases from 11.8 mX cm at room-temperature to 5.2 mX cm at 1690 K, in reasonable agreement with the values measured up to $650 K. Electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity are extracted from suspended highly doped n-type silicon wires in which the heat losses are predominantly through the wires. In this case, measured q(T) (decreasing from 20.5 mX cm at room temperature to 12 mX cm at 620 K) is used to extract q(T) at higher temperatures (decreasing to 1 mX cm at 1690 K) and k(T) (decreasing from 30 W m À1 K À1 at room temperature to 20 W m À1 K À1 at 1690 K). The method is tested by using the extracted parameters to model wires with different dimensions. The experimental and simulated I-V curves for these wires show good agreement up to high voltage and temperature levels. This technique allows extraction of the electrical resistivity and thermal conductivity up to very high temperatures from self-heated microstructures. V C 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.

High-temperature thermoelectric transport at small scales: Thermal generation, transport and recombination of minority carriers

“…ρ , k and S of nanocrystalline thin films depend on deposition conditions and are not easy to measure directly at elevated temperatures. We have measured ρ ( T ) and S ( T ) simultaneously in the 300–650 K range and extracted k ( T ) in this range by using the measured ρ ( T ) and matching simulated and experimental I - V curves15. We have extrapolated k ( T ) and extracted ρ ( T ) beyond 650 K using the same approach.…”

A review on efficient self-heating in nanowire sensors: Prospects for very-low power devices

“…Although most of the research efforts in self-heated nanowire devices have been focused on conductometric sensors, there are remarkable examples of applications of the selfheating principle to heat up another type of devices, showing that it could be applied to improve energy efficiency in diverse applications [13,64,68,70,72,[94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101].…”

“…Moreover, thermal effects due to self-heating in nanowires have been investigated to thermally activate memristor behaviors [94], thermoelectricity [64,68], and single wire transistors [72,[97][98][99][100][101].…”

“…Moreover, this is clearly not a problem in applications of self-heating where no resistive-sensing is needed (e.g. emitters [13,70], transistors [63,72], memristors [94], thermoelectricity [64,68]).…”

Suppression of thermoelectric Thomson effect in silicon microwires under large electrical bias and implications for phase-change memory devices

“…The fabrication process and temperature-dependent physical parameters of these wires were previously reported in Ref. 10. Wire lengths range from 1 to 5 lm and widths range from 0.2 to 1 lm.…”