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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 7201 |
Journal | Nature communications |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 2022 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
- General Physics and Astronomy