Integration of boron arsenide cooling substrates into gallium nitride devices

OOS Kang and M Li and H Wu and H Nguyen and T Aoki and YJ Hu, NATURE ELECTRONICS, 4, 416-423 (2021).

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-021-00595-9

Thermal management is critical in modern electronic systems. Efforts to improve heat dissipation have led to the exploration of novel semiconductor materials with high thermal conductivity, including boron arsenide (BAs) and boron phosphide (BP). However, the integration of such materials into devices and the measurement of their interface energy transport remain unexplored. Here, we show that BAs and BP cooling substrates can be heterogeneously integrated with metals, a wide-bandgap semiconductor (gallium nitride, GaN) and high-electron- mobility transistor devices. GaN-on-BAs structures exhibit a high thermal boundary conductance of 250 MW m(-2) K-1, and comparison of device-level hot-spot temperatures with length-dependent scaling (from 100 mu m to 100 nm) shows that the power cooling performance of BAs exceeds that of reported diamond devices. Furthermore, operating AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility transistors with BAs cooling substrates exhibit substantially lower hot-spot temperatures than diamond and silicon carbide at the same transistor power density, illustrating their potential for use in the thermal management of radiofrequency electronics. We attribute the high thermal management performance of BAs and BP to their unique phonon band structures and interface matching. Boron arsenide and boron phosphide cooling substrates can be integrated with other materials, including the wide-bandgap semiconductor gallium nitride, creating structures that exhibit high thermal boundary conductances and high-electron-mobility transistors that exhibit low hot-spot temperatures.

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