Vertically Aligned Graphene Layers as Thermal Interface Material for Gallium Nitride Semiconductor Components

Graphene layers have a very high basal plane thermal conductivity, but a low conductivity out-of-plane. When placed on a heat source, they can efficiently spread heat laterally, but not vertically. To fully exploit ultrahigh basal plane thermal conductivity of graphene layers, they can be assembled vertically. We examine the efficiency of vertically aligned graphene layers as thermal interface material (TIM) for gallium nitride (GaN) high electrons mobility transistors (HEMTs) with ceramic packages. The junction temperature (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$T_{j}$</tex>) is directly measured using thermocouples bonded to the die. The measurements are done under free convection in the ambient. The graphene results are compared with two conventional TIMs. It is shown the graphene TIM can lower the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$T_{j}$</tex> by at least <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$5^{\circ} \mathrm{C}$</tex>. More temperature reduction is expected when testing with forced cooling. A transient thermal finite element model is also used for temperature prediction, showing good agreement with the experimental data.