High thermal conductivity in wafer-scale cubic silicon carbide crystals

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.

High thermal conductivity electronic materials are critical for next-generation electronics and photonics. Here, the authors report isotropic high thermal conductivity of 3C-SiC wafers exceeding 500 W m⁻¹K⁻¹.