High thermal conductivity in wafer-scale cubic silicon carbide crystals

Zhe Cheng (), Jianbo Liang (), Keisuke Kawamura, Hao Zhou, Hidetoshi Asamura, Hiroki Uratani, Janak Tiwari, Samuel Graham, Yutaka Ohno, Yasuyoshi Nagai, Tianli Feng, Naoteru Shigekawa and David G. Cahill ()
Additional contact information
Zhe Cheng: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jianbo Liang: Osaka Metropolitan University
Keisuke Kawamura: SIC Division, Air Water Inc.
Hao Zhou: University of Utah
Hidetoshi Asamura: Specialty Materials Dept., Electronics Unit
Hiroki Uratani: SIC Division, Air Water Inc.
Janak Tiwari: University of Utah
Samuel Graham: Georgia Institute of Technology
Yutaka Ohno: Tohoku University
Yasuyoshi Nagai: Tohoku University
Tianli Feng: University of Utah
Naoteru Shigekawa: Osaka Metropolitan University
David G. Cahill: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract High thermal conductivity electronic materials are critical components for high-performance electronic and photonic devices as both active functional materials and thermal management materials. We report an isotropic high thermal conductivity exceeding 500 W m−1K−1 at room temperature in high-quality wafer-scale cubic silicon carbide (3C-SiC) crystals, which is the second highest among large crystals (only surpassed by diamond). Furthermore, the corresponding 3C-SiC thin films are found to have record-high in-plane and cross-plane thermal conductivity, even higher than diamond thin films with equivalent thicknesses. Our results resolve a long-standing puzzle that the literature values of thermal conductivity for 3C-SiC are lower than the structurally more complex 6H-SiC. We show that the observed high thermal conductivity in this work arises from the high purity and high crystal quality of 3C-SiC crystals which avoids the exceptionally strong defect-phonon scatterings. Moreover, 3C-SiC is a SiC polytype which can be epitaxially grown on Si. We show that the measured 3C-SiC-Si thermal boundary conductance is among the highest for semiconductor interfaces. These findings provide insights for fundamental phonon transport mechanisms, and suggest that 3C-SiC is an excellent wide-bandgap semiconductor for applications of next-generation power electronics as both active components and substrates.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34943-w Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-34943-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34943-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().