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Integration of boron arsenide cooling substrates into gallium nitride devices

Nature Electronics volume 4, pages 416–423 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

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 μm 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.

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Fig. 1: Electronics thermal management using integrated HTC materials as a cooling substrate to improve heat dissipation.
Fig. 2: Heterogeneous interfaces and ultrafast optical spectroscopy measurements of temperature-dependent thermal boundary conductance.
Fig. 3: Ab initio calculation of phonon band structures and atomistic modelling of the phonon spectral contribution to the thermal boundary conductance.
Fig. 4: Device integration of BAs and GaN for high-performance thermal management versus transistor channel length scaling and power density.

Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and the other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H. Albrecht for careful proofreading of this manuscript and P. Chen for helpful discussion. Y.H. acknowledges support from an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship under grant no. FG-2019-11788, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant no. DMR-1753393, a Young Investigator Award from the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant no. FA9550-17-1-0149, the Watanabe Excellence in Research Award, the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge and the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation. This work used computational and storage services associated with the Hoffman 2 Shared Cluster provided by UCLA Institute for Digital Research and Education’s Research Technology Group, and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), which is supported by NSF under grant no. ACI-1548562.

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  1. These authors contributed equally: Joon Sang Kang, Man Li, Huan Wu, Huuduy Nguyen.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Joon Sang Kang, Man Li, Huan Wu, Huuduy Nguyen & Yongjie Hu

  2. Irvine Materials Research Institute, Irvine, CA, USA

    Toshihiro Aoki

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Contributions

Y.H. proposed and directed the research. J.S.K., M.L. and H.N. performed the experiments. M.L. and H.W. performed the theory calculations. T.A. helped with the TEM study. J.S.K., M.L., H.W., H.N. and Y.H. discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yongjie Hu.

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Peer review information Nature Electronics thanks Qian Zhang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Kang, J.S., Li, M., Wu, H. et al. Integration of boron arsenide cooling substrates into gallium nitride devices. Nat Electron 4, 416–423 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00595-9

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