Thermal spreading resistance of GaN HEMTs with heat source heating studied by hybrid Monte Carlo-diffusion simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid Monte Carlo-diffusion simulation method to accurately and efficiently analyze thermal spreading resistance in GaN HEMTs, revealing the significant impact of heating schemes on phonon transport.

Contribution

It develops a hybrid phonon Monte Carlo-diffusion approach that reduces computational costs while maintaining accuracy for cross-scale heat transfer analysis.

Findings

Hybrid method reduces simulation time by up to 100 times.

Heating schemes significantly influence phonon transport and thermal resistance.

Thermal resistance varies with heat source thickness and heating scheme.

Abstract

Exact assessment of thermal spreading resistance is of great importance to the thermal management of electronic devices, especially when completely considering the heat conduction process from the nanoscale heat source to the macroscopic scale heat sink. The existing simulation methods are either based on convectional Fourier's law or limited to small system sizes, making it difficult to accurately and efficiently study the cross-scale heat transfer. In this paper, a hybrid phonon Monte Carlo-diffusion method that couples phonon Monte Carlo (MC) method with Fourier's law by dividing the computational domain is adopted to analyze thermal spreading resistance in ballistic-diffusive regime. Compared with phonon MC simulation, the junction temperature of the hybrid method has the same precision, while the time costs could be reduced up to 2 orders of magnitude at most. Furthermore, the simulation results indicate that the heating scheme has a remarkable impact on phonon transport. The thermal resistance of the heat source (HS) scheme can be larger than that of the heat flux (HF) scheme, which is opposite from the prediction of Fourier's law. In the HS scheme, the enhanced phonon-boundary scattering counteracts the broadening of the heat source, leading to a stronger ballistic effect as the heat source thickness decreases. The conclusion is verified by a one-dimensional thermal resistance model. This work has opened up an opportunity for the fast and extensive thermal modeling of cross-scale heat transfer in electronic devices and highlighted the influence of heating schemes.