Anisotropic thermal conductivity measurement of organic thin film with bidirectional 3ω method

Organic thin film materials with molecular ordering are gaining attention as they exhibit semiconductor characteristics. When using them for electronics, the thermal management becomes important, where heat dissipation is directional owing to the anisotropic thermal conductivity arising from the molecular ordering. However, it is difficult to evaluate the anisotropy by simultaneously measuring in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities of the film on a substrate because the film is typically as thin as tens to hundreds of nanometers and its in-plane thermal conductivity is low. Here, we develop a novel bidirectional 3ω system that measures the anisotropic thermal conductivity of thin films by patterning two metal wires with different widths and preparing the films on top and extracting the in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivities using the difference in their sensitivities to the metal-wire width. Using the developed system, the thermal conductivity of spin-coated poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) with thickness of 70 nm was successfully measured. The measured in-plane thermal conductivity of PEDOT:PSS film was as high as 2.9 W m⁻¹ K⁻¹ presumably due to the high structural ordering, giving an anisotropy of 10. The calculations of measurement sensitivity to the film thickness and thermal conductivities suggest that the device can be applied to much thinner films by utilizing metal wires with a smaller width.