Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Thermal Transport at Nanometer Size Point Contacts on a Planar Silicon Substrate Available to Purchase

A Non Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics (NEMD) simulation has been used to calculate the temperature distribution in the substrate side of a nanometer scale point contact on a planar silicon substrate with different doping concentrations and contact radii. The size of the non-uniform temperature zone was found to approach the average nearest-neighbor distance of impurity dopants when the contact radius was reduced below this distance. At a contact radius of 0.5 nm, the calculated spreading thermal resistance at the nano-point contact agrees with those obtained using two phonon transport models. At a contact radius between 1 nm and 6 nm, however, the spreading resistance from the NEMD is much larger than those from the two models that assume small deviation from the equilibrium distribution.