Integrating Diamond for Cooling Electronics
Authors: Chowdhury Srabanti 
Published: November 2022

III-Nitrides promise to offer high-frequency power amplifiers at higher power densities. This is attractive for realizing device platforms for 5G and beyond. It also enables integrating Si-based electronics to complement functionalities. However, to obtain the full potential of III-Nitrides one must operate these transistors at higher power densities, for which thermal management is crucial.Due to the continuous need for higher performance in various applications ranging from DC to W-band frequencies, semiconductor devices are pushed to higher power densities. This results in a higher junction temperature owing to the Joule heating in the channel resulting in device performance degradation and premature failure. Using devices based on wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors such as Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Gallium Oxide (GaOx) with a larger critical electric field and high-temperature tolerance, one could increase the power density. However, in order to increase the output power to the levels that is promised by these wide bandgap materials, junction temperature reduction through device-level cooling is critical. We are actively researching thermal management at device, circuit and packaging level using synthetic polycrystalline (PC) diamond. PC-diamond, at an appropriate grain size offers a TC is higher than any competing thermal vias with metals without interfering the electrical performance. Over the past 5 years we have demonstrated the potential of integrating diamond with GaN and recently achieving a record low diamond/GaN thermal boundary resistance (TBR) along with a relatively high diamond thermal conductivity (TC). This remarkable thermal performance was be achieved by maintaining the electrical performance, as demonstrated by the unharmed channel charge and mobility results.

There are two key requirements for thermal management using heat spreading from the channel: first, a low thermal boundary resistance (TBR) between the hot spot in the channel and the heat spreader is required (in this study between GaN channel and diamond). Second, a low thermal resistance path to the heat-sink is crucial from the diamond layer which is directly proportional to diamond’s thermal conductivity (TC). In collaboration with Univ of Bristol, we have reported a TBR of ~3 m2K/GW, to date, known to be the lowest reported TBR for GaN HEMT technology. Diamond-GaN TBR depends strongly on the interface smoothness and the thickness of interfacial Si3N4 layer. A thinner Si3N4 resulted in lower TBR and allowed superior phonon coupling from the channel to the spreader. We have also measured a remarkably high TC for a 2 μm-thick diamond layer yielding over 650 W/m.K. The diamond grains are near isotropic in shape that allows excellent in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivity. Achieving high TC within a thin film of diamond, grown heterogeneously, underscores the importance of our technique, since it reduces the residual stress when integrating with different materials that involves many thin layers like GaN/AlGaN HEMT epi-layers.

β-Ga2O3 is an emerging ultra-wide bandgap material showing promises for both power and RF devices. However, the material’s low thermal conductivity poses to be a challenge for efficient power delivery (at any frequencies). PC diamond was successfully grown on (‾¯201)β-Ga2O3 using proper nucleation technique and thermal characterizations were conducted. A thermal conductivity (diamond + nucleation) and thermal boundary resistance at the diamond/β-Ga2O3 interface of 110 ± 33 W/mK and 30.2 ± 1.8 m2K/GW, respectively were measured.

Our current results demonstrates a very promising roadmap for wide bandgap semiconductors via diamond integration.