High thermal conductivity and thermal boundary conductance of homoepitaxially grown gallium nitride (GaN) thin films

Gallium nitride (GaN) has emerged as a quintessential wide band-gap semiconductor for an array of high-power and high-frequency electronic devices. The phonon thermal resistances that arise in GaN thin films can result in detrimental performances in these applications. In this work, we report on the thermal conductivity of submicrometer and micrometer thick homoepitaxial GaN films grown via two different techniques (metal-organic chemical vapor deposition and molecular beam epitaxy) and measured via two different techniques (time domain thermoreflectance and steady-state thermoreflectance). When unintentionally doped, these homoepitaxial GaN films possess higher thermal conductivities than other heteroepitaxially grown GaN films of equivalent thicknesses reported in the literature. When doped, the thermal conductivities of the GaN films decrease substantially due to phonon-dopant scattering, which reveals that the major source of phonon thermal resistance in homoepitaxially grown GaN films can arise from doping. Our temperature-dependent thermal conductivity measurements reveal that below 200 K, scattering with the defects and GaN/GaN interface limits the thermal transport of the unintentionally doped homoepitaxial GaN films. Further, we demonstrate the ability to achieve the highest reported thermal boundary conductance at metal/GaN interfaces through in situ deposition of aluminum in ultrahigh vacuum during molecular beam epitaxy growth of the GaN films. Our results inform the development of low thermal resistance GaN films and interfaces by furthering the understanding of phonon scattering processes that impact the thermal transport in homoepitaxially grown GaN.