Nanowerk July 9, 2021
A team of researchers in the US (UCLA, UC Irvine) explored the interface energy transport in semiconductor materials with high thermal conductivity, including boron arsenide (BAs) and boron phosphide (BP). They showed 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. 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. The researchers attribute the high thermal management performance of BAs and BP to their unique phonon band structures and interface matching…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Electronics thermal management using integrated HTC materials as a cooling substrate to improve heat dissipation. Credit: Nature Electronics volume 4, pages416–423 (2021)