Possibly the future in high power semiconductors?

Several years ago the semiconductor boron arsenide was predicted to have a very high thermal conductivity and now three separate groups have finally prepared crystals pure and uniform enough to confirm that in three recent Science papers. The crystals are a few mm across and the measured thermal conductivity ranges from about 1000 to 1300 W/m-K. For comparison, silicon is about 150, copper 400, and diamond 2000. Now they just have to make perfect 300 mm wafers with good transistors. Should only take another week or two :-).

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Regards, 
Carl Ijames
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Carl
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The problem would be to spread the heat into a heat sink. A semiconductor is usually small and thin, so if it's sitting on copper, the theta and spreading thermal resistance of the copper dominates.

A biggish, thick chunk of the stuff might be used as a heat spreader, even for a different type of semiconductor. So the BAs wouldn't even need to be the semiconductor.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

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