Cooling performance of integrated thermoelectric microcooler

A theoretical model for calculating the cooling performance of an integrated thermoelectric microcooler (ITM), which takes into account the effects of substrate thermal bypass, convection and radiation heat loads and electrical and thermal contact resistances, is developed based on a recently proposed device configuration. The model is used to obtain the optimum thermoelement length for achieving maximum cooling performance of an ITM. It is concluded that an ITM with adequate cooling performance for microelectronics applications can be made using currently available integrated circuit fabrication technology. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.