Thermoelectric coolers: Infinite potentials for finite localized microchip cooling

With the ever-growing semiconductor and microchip industries, increasing amount and categories of personal electronics have flooded into our daily life. Overheating is the key challenge limiting further performance enhancement of the high-speed microchips in electronics. Thermoelectric cooling, a solid-state active cooling method, possesses great potential for localized cooling with the advantages of noise-free, vibration-free, maintenance-free, and liquid-media-free, and can solve the challenge in microchips. By proper material engineering, such as carrier concentration, band engineering, hierarchical architecture engineering, high performance thermoelectric materials with high potential for thermoelectric cooling have been widely developed. Through further proper device design based on state-of-art thermoelectric materials, such as vertical thin film thermoelectric device design, contact interface engineering and thermoelectric and microchip integration, thermoelectric coolers show infinite potentials for finite cooling requirement of microchips. (c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The editorial office of Journal of Materials Science & Technology.

Automated summary

With the growth of the semiconductor and microchip industries, the use of personal electronics has increased. Thermoelectric cooling, a solid-state cooling method, offers numerous advantages for solving the overheating challenges in microchips. Through material engineering and device design, thermoelectric coolers demonstrate infinite potential for applications.