Engineering

Materials science

Thermal conductivity

Thermoelectric cooling

Thermoelectric effect

Thermoelectric materials

Mechanical engineering

Thermodynamics

Thermoelectric generator

Physics

Electronics

Composite material

Heat sink

Optoelectronics

Electrical engineering

Overheating (electricity)

Engineering physics

Journal of Material Science and Technology

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.

Thermoelectric coolers: Infinite potentials for finite localized microchip cooling