Effect of Electrical Contact Resistance in a Silicon Nanowire Thermoelectric Cooler and a Design Guideline for On-Chip Cooling Applications

Contact resistance gains prominence as feature size reduces to the nanometer length scale. This work studies the effects of electrical contact resistance on the performance of silicon nanowire-based thermoelectric coolers using COMSOL Multiphysics. The values of the contact resistance used to simulate the impact are experimentally extracted from a pair of thermoelectric legs with each leg made of top-down-fabricated 100 silicon nanowires having diameter of 100 nm. Analytical models agreeing well with the simulation results are provided. Lastly, a design methodology is proposed for optimum performance in on-chip cooling applications.