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Thermionic Cooling Of Optoelectronic And Microelectronic Devices, S. P. Lee, B. C. Lough, R. A. Lewis, C. Zhang

Chao Zhang

Solid-state thermionic cooling has gained attention recently because of its potential high cooling power. Thermionic devices based on semiconductor heterostructures utilize the band-edge offset at a heterojunction as the thermionic emission potential barrier and a thin layer to separate the cold and hot junction. In this paper, we present the behavior of thermionic coolers with periodic barriers using gallium arsenide/aluminium gallium arsenide (GaAs/Al/sub x/Ga/sub 1-x/As) semiconductor heterostructures. The exact numerical calculation to model the device performance has shown that the thermal efficiency in a multilayer structure is optimised when the effect of phonon scattering is introduced in the model. Besides, …