Internal and External Heat Exchange in Electronic and Optoelectronic Devices

MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics
Boston, MA
ABSTRACT:
Tremendous progress in the areas of electronic and optoelectronic devices during the last several decades has yielded devices which are increasingly faster, smaller, and more sophisticated. Components for communication systems and microprocessors are now fabricated in dense arrays with submicron technology. While this has been advantageous from a performance perspective, devices must deposit waste heat into an ever-smaller surrounding space, making thermal management an increasingly high priority in device design.

While traditional methods for device temperature stabilization typically utilize an external cooler, this talk will focus on the modeling and optimization of micron-scale heat exchange that is internal to active devices, in particular diode structures and semiconductor lasers. Thermoelectric effects in diode structures are predicted to cause internal temperature drops as large as 10K under ideal conditions. Novel approaches to incorporating thermoelectric effects in the design of new devices will be presented, as well as experimental data taken using microthermocouple probes which confirm the heat transfer models. Nanoscale thermal measurements using Scanning Thermal Microscopy and thermoreflectance techniques and models describing the balance of heat flow out of these devices will also be discussed.

BIO:
Kevin Pipe received S.B. and M.Eng. Degrees from MIT in 1999 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, studying heat processes in semiconductor lasers and other bipolar devices. He will be joining the faculty of the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Michigan in January 2004, pursuing research related to micro and nanoscale thermal physics.