Development of a thermoelectric energy harvester with thermal isolation cavity by standard CMOS process

Design and verification of a thermoelectric energy harvester with stacked polysilicon thermocouples by CMOS process

“…Fig. 1(a) has been proposed [10], across which the heat input from top surface is confined passing through in-plane thermolegs. Thermal isolation cavity design beneath the thermolegs is to eliminate heat leakage and facilitate better thermoelectric conversion.…”

“…The power factor and voltage factor, p = P o /A T 2 and u = U o /A T, have commonly been employed to evaluate the generator performance. It has been shown that there will be little heat leakage by the 10 m thermal isolation cavity design [10] and the power factor p and voltage factor u can be derived by using the thermal model [10,13]: where A is the total area of the TEG, T 0 and T 1 are the cold-/hotside temperature, and…”

“…The TEG design with co-planar p-/n-thermocouples has also been developed to harvest the heat flux from the top to the bottom surface [8,9], but the fabrication process remains incompatible to standard CMOS process. A most recent work of TEG design in standard CMOS process has been reported [10]. Stacked system (also called chip stacking) is desirable CMOS semiconductor foundry beyond the state-of-the-art 45 nm process.…”

Microstructures for characterization of seebeck coefficient of doped polysilicon films

“…By using the thermoelectric (Seebeck) effect, diversified micro-transducers, such as IR detector (Socher et al 2000;Du and Lee 2000;Hirota et al 2007), thermoelectric power generator (Yang et al 2009(Yang et al , 2010Wang et al 2009a;Xie et al 2010) and Peltier cooler (Baltes et al 1998;Huang et al 2008) have been reported. Heavily doped polysilicon have been widely used as thermoelectric material due to that it's Complementary-Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) material and it gives high Seebeck coefficient.…”

Solar cells on CMOS chips as energy harvesters : integration and CMOS compatibility

“…Research has been carried out on small-scale thermoelectric energy harvesters [34][35][36][37]. Also, there are commercial thermoelectric products such as the Seiko Thermic watch.…”