Electrostatic Influence of Diamond Heat-Spreaders on GaN FET Performance

Abstract

Diamond, with its exceptional thermal conductivity, is widely explored as a heat spreader to improve thermal management in GaN-based power and RF electronics. In this work, we use Sentaurus TCAD to model AlGaN/GaN HEMTs with integrated diamond heat spreaders, incorporating advanced physical models such as thermal boundary resistance (TBR) and temperature-dependent bandgap narrowing. While diamond significantly enhances heat dissipation, our simulations reveal an important but often overlooked tradeoff: electrostatic modulation at the diamond and semiconductor interface. We initially modeled a p-GaN HEMT with all-around diamond integration and show agreement to the experimentally reported electrothermal benefits of diamond heat spreader integration. However, we observe strong band bending at the diamond/GaN interface alongside electric field generation and increased valence band energy in diamond. As a result, an interfacial hole accumulation region forms at the GaN surface, altering vertical transport and hindering current injection which prevents high on-state current. These results indicate that although diamond improves thermal performance, it can also actively influence the electrostatics of the transistor. To address both the elevated TBR and the undesired interfacial band bending, we propose the incorporation of an engineered interlayer. Building on our Sentaurus TCAD results, we develop a Silvaco TCAD TLM test structure to characterize the extent of the hole accumulation region formation and give insight to future studies on mitigation through interlayer development.