Extending electrical resistivity measurements in micro-scratching of silicon to determine thermal conductivity of the metallic phase Si-II

Ductile Regime Machining (DRM) of semiconductors offers higher quality of the resulting surfaces. To optimize this process, it is necessary 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 is often considered 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 determination of the conductivity as a function of temperature.