  Silicides are used extensively in nano- and microdevices due to their low
electrical resistivity, low contact resistance to silicon, and their process
compatibility. In this work, the thermal interface conductance of TiSi$_2$,
CoSi$_2$, NiSi and PtSi are studied using time-domain thermoreflectance.
Exploiting the fact that most silicides formed on Si(111) substrates grow
epitaxially, while most silicides on Si(100) do not, we study the effect of
epitaxy, and show that for a wide variety of interfaces there is no difference
in the thermal interface conductance of epitaxial and non-epitaxial
silicide/silicon interfaces. The effect of substrate carrier concentration is
also investigated over a wide range of p- and n-type doping, and is found to be
independent of carrier concentration, regardless of whether the interface is
epitaxial and regardless of silicide type. In the case of epitaxial CoSi$_2$, a
comparison of temperature dependant experimental data is made with two detailed
computational models using (1) full-dispersion diffuse mismatch modeling (DMM)
including the effect of near-interfacial strain and (2) an atomistic Green'
function (AGF) approach that integrates near-interface changes in the
interatomic force constants obtained through density functional perturbation
theory. At temperatures above 100K, the AGF approach greatly underpredicts the
CoSi$_2$ data, while the DMM prediction matches the data well. The
full-dispersion DMM is also found to closely predict the experimentally
observed temperature-dependent interface conductance for epitaxial NiSi/Si and
non-epitaxial TiSi$_2$/Si interfaces. In the case of epitaxial PtSi/Si
interfaces, full dispersion DMM significantly overpredicts the experimental
data.
