Measuring Thermal Conductivity of Nano Deposition Using Pt Hot Film

Abstract

A novel method to measure the thermal conductivity of nano scale deposition is developed by using platinum hot film suspended between two terminals. The nano-deposition, which can be built by either focused ion or electron beam, is one of the newest fabrication techniques for three dimensional nano-structure, and can be applied to patterning, repairing, bonding, et al. However, its thermal property is still unknown because the size is too small to measure by the existing thermal sensors. The hot film used here is fabricated by NEMS (Nanoelectromechanical Systems) technology and has enough sensitivity to measure nanoscale materials. Direct current heating method is applied before and after the deposition and the change of averaged temperature increase of the platinum film gives the thermal conductivity of additionally-deposited material by using one-dimensional heat conduction model. As an example, amorphous carbon (a-C) with the thickness of 563 nm is deposited by electron beam induced deposition (EBID) method and thermal conductivity of a-C nano-deposition is obtained to be 0.61 W⁄(m·K) to 0.73 W⁄(m·K) at 100 K to 340 K. In order to confirm the reliability of this method, two-dimensional numerical simulation is conducted and the measuring uncertainty is calculated exactly. The effect of thermal boundary resistance is also treated and discussed. From the comparison of 1D model and 2D simulation, it is found that the deposition extended on the terminals by 1 μm length can decrease the error of 1D model from 5.5 % to 3.1 % but no more extension has little effect to improve the accuracy of this method.