Abstract
High thermal conductivity electronic components with low interfacial thermal resistance are of technological importance and fundamental interest of research. Diamond, a superhard material with ultrahigh thermal conductivity at room temperature, is desirable for microelectronics thermal management. Cubic polymorph of boron nitride (c-BN) is a promising material due to wide bandgap and diamond like structure and properties. To understand the nature in thermal transport of diamond, c-BN and the most commonly used silicon (Si) semiconductor, ab initio phonon Boltzmann transport equations are employed to investigate lattice vibrational properties of these three materials. At 300 K, the predicted thermal conductivity of Si, diamond and c-BN reached 142, 2112, and 736 W/(m·K), respectively. What's more, heat transport phenomena across the interfaces of Si/diamond, c-BN/diamond and Si/c-BN are unfolded. In comparison, the interfacial thermal conductance of c-BN/diamond is ten-fold of Si/diamond; besides, the thermal conductance across Si/c-BN interface is 20.2% larger than that of Si/diamond at 300 K and 18.9% larger at 340 K. These findings provide us new vision and potential solution to heat dissipation of high-local-power density devices, shedding light on future thermal management of c-BN and diamond related electronics.