Extending Electrical Resistivity Measurements in Micro-scratching of Silicon to Determine Thermal Conductivity of the Metallic Phase Si-II

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to estimate the thermal conductivity of metallic silicon phase Si-II during micro-scratching by analyzing electrical resistivity measurements in real time, aiding the understanding of silicon's thermal behavior under pressure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel procedure combining resistivity data and temperature evaluation to determine the thermal conductivity of pressurized silicon's metallic phase Si-II.

Findings

Thermal conductivity of Si-II can be inferred from resistivity data.

The method enables real-time thermal property estimation during micro-scratching.

Provides insights into silicon's thermal kinetics under pressure.

Abstract

Ductile Regime Machining of semiconductors (DRM) offers higher quality of the resulting surfaces. To optimize this process, it is required to understand the thermal kinetics of silicon metallization under pressure. Such understanding is not yet possible since the metallic phases of silicon aren't readily amenable to thermal characterization through direct measurements. This being the case, one has to rely on processing indirect measurement data to deduce refined estimates of the thermal transport properties of pressurized Silicon. A feasible measurement of this sort is the electrical resistivity, since its' variation during indentation and consider is often an indicator of the formation of the metallic silicon phase Si-II under the indenter. This paper, therefore, describes a procedure by which the average thermal conductivity of the metallic phase of silicon, Si-II is extracted from electrical resistivity measurements taken in real time. The procedure is based on teaming a temperature evaluation code to the resistivity measurements thus allowing the extraction of the conductivity as a function of temperature.