Brian Donovan’s paper, “Thermal boundary conductance across metal-gallium nitride (GaN) interfaces from 80 – 450 K,” has been published in Applied Physics Letters (Appl. Phys. Lett. 105, 203502 (2014)). In this work, we show that the thermal boundary conductance across metal/GaN interfaces can impose a thermal resistance similar to that of GaN/substrate interfaces. We also show that these thermal resistances decrease with increasing operating temperature and can be greatly affected by inclusion of a thin adhesion layers. Congrats Brian!!!
Abstract
Thermal boundary conductance is of critical importance to gallium nitride (GaN)-based device performance. While the GaN-substrate interface has been well studied, insufficient attention has been paid to the metal contacts in the device. In this work, we measure the thermal boundaryconductance across interfaces of Au, Al, and Au-Ti contact layers and GaN. We show that in these basic systems, metal-GaN interfaces can impose a thermal resistance similar to that of GaN-substrate interfaces. We also show that these thermal resistances decrease with increasing operating temperature and can be greatly affected by inclusion of a thin adhesion layers.
The material is based upon the work partially supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under AFOSR Award No. FA9550-14-1-0067 (Subaward No. 5010-UV-AFOSR-0067) and the National Science Foundation (CBET-1339436). This work was partially supported by the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) of Virginia. Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory managed and operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corporation, for the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration under Contract No. DE-AC04-94AL85000.
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