Christopher Perez, Aaron J McLeod, Michelle E Chen, Su-In Yi, Sam Vaziri, Ryan Hood, Scott T Ueda, Xinyu Bao, Mehdi Asheghi, Woosung Park, A Alec Talin, Suhas Kumar, Eric Pop, Andrew C Kummel, Kenneth E Goodson
Aluminum nitride (AlN) is one of the few electrically insulating materials with excellent thermal conductivity, but high-quality films typically require exceedingly hot deposition temperatures (>1000 °C). For thermal management applications in dense or high-power integrated circuits, it is important to deposit heat spreaders at low temperatures (<500 °C), without affecting the underlying electronics. Here we demonstrate 100 nm to 1.7 μm thick AlN films achieved by low-temperature (<100 °C) sputtering, correlating their thermal properties with their grain size and interfacial quality, which we analyze by X-ray diffraction, transmission X-ray microscopy, as well as Raman and Auger spectroscopy...
October 5, 2023: ACS Nano