The United States develops semiconductor materials with high thermal conductivity to suppress chip heating.
With the increase in the number of transistors in the chip, the computing performance of the computer continues to improve, but the high densification also produces many hot spots.
Without proper thermal management technology, in addition to slowing down the operation speed of the processor and reducing the reliability, there are also reasons for Prevents overheating and requires additional energy, creating energy inefficiency problems. In order to solve this problem, the University of California, Los Angeles developed a new semiconductor material with extremely high thermal conductivity in 2018, which is composed of defect-free boron arsenide and boron phosphide, which is similar to existing heat dissipation materials such as diamond and silicon carbide. ratio, with more than 3 times the thermal conductivity.
In June 2021, the University of California, Los Angeles, used new semiconductor materials to combine with high-power computer chips to successfully suppress the heat generation of the chips, thereby improving computer performance. The research team inserted the boron arsenide semiconductor between the chip and the heat sink as a combination of the heat sink and the chip to improve the heat dissipation effect, and carried out research on the thermal management performance of the actual device.
After bonding the boron arsenide substrate to the wide energy gap gallium nitride semiconductor, it was confirmed that the thermal conductivity of the gallium nitride/boron arsenide interface was as high as 250 MW/m2K, and the interface thermal resistance reached an extremely small level. The boron arsenide substrate is further combined with an advanced high electron mobility transistor chip composed of aluminum gallium nitride/gallium nitride, and it is confirmed that the heat dissipation effect is significantly better than that of diamond or silicon carbide.
The research team operated the chip at the maximum capacity, and measured the hot spot from room temperature to the highest temperature. The experimental results show that the temperature of the diamond heat sink is 137°C, the silicon carbide heat sink is 167°C, and the boron arsenide heat sink is only 87°C. The excellent thermal conductivity of this interface comes from the unique phononic band structure of boron arsenide and the integration of the interface. The boron arsenide material not only has high thermal conductivity, but also has a small interface thermal resistance.
It can be used as a heat sink to achieve higher device operating power. It is expected to be used in long-distance, high-capacity wireless communication in the future. It can be used in the field of high frequency power electronics or electronic packaging.
Post time: Aug-08-2022