Optimizing Diamond Heat Spreaders for Thermal Management of Hotspots for GaN Devices

As devices become smaller while still requiring high reliability in the presence of extreme power densities, new thermal management solutions are needed. Nowhere is this more evident than with the use of Gallium Nitride (GaN) transistors, where engineers struggle with the thermal barriers limiting the ability to achieve the intrinsic performance potential of GaN semiconductor devices.

Emerging as a common solution to this GaN thermal management challenge are metallized diamond heat spreaders. A diamond heat sink has been applied with a hybrid Si micro-cooler for to cool GaN devices. Several different grades and thicknesses of microwave CVD diamond heat spreaders, as well as various bonding layers, are characterized for their thermal effects. The heat spreader is bonded through a TCB (thermal compression bonding) process to a Si thermal test chip designed to mimic the hotspots of 8 GaN units. The heat dissipation capabilities were compared through experimental tests and fluid-solid coupling simulations, both showing consistent results. In one configuration, using a diamond heat spreader 400μm thick with a thermal conductivity > 2000W/mK, to dissipate 70W heating power, the maximum chip temperature can be reduced by 40.4%, for test chips 100μm thick. And 10kW/cm2 hotspot heat flux can be dissipated while maintaining the maximum hotspot temperature under 160°C. The concentrated heat flux has been effectively reduced by the diamond heat sink, and much better cooling capability of the Si micro-cooler has been achieved for high power GaN devices.