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Carbide forming interlayers, such as amorphous silicon nitride, are typically used for GaN-on-diamond heterogenous integration. This interlayer has a low thermal conductivity, introducing an additional extrinsic interfacial thermal resistance. It may therefore be advantageous to omit this layer, directly bonding GaN-to-diamond (van der Waals bond). However, weakly bonded interfaces are known to increase the intrinsic thermal boundary resistance. An adapted acoustic mismatch model has been implemented to assess which bonding approach is the most optimal for low thermal resistance GaN-on-diamond. A high thermal boundary resistance of 200 m2 K GW−1 is predicted for weakly bonded GaN-to-diamond interfaces, which is close to the measured value of 220 ± 70 m2 K GW−1, and ∼7× higher than values measured when a 10’s nm-thick SiN interlayer is included. Covalently bonded interfaces are therefore critical for achieving low thermal resistance GaN-on-diamond.

A method is presented to characterize the anisotropic thermal properties of materials based on nanosecond transient thermoreflectance (TTR). An analytical heat transfer model is derived for the TTR signal, showing that the signal is sensitive to out-of-plane and in-plane heat conductions at distinct time scales. This sensitivity feature can be exploited to simultaneously determine the out-of-plane and in-plane thermal conductivities. Examples are given for molybdenum disulphide, hexagonal boron nitride, and highly oriented pyrolytic graphite to assess the validity of this method.

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Dispersion in capacitance and conductance measurements in AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors is typically interpreted as resulting from interface states. Measurements on varying gate-length devices and a model of an interface-trap-free device are used to demonstrate that the distributed-resistance-induced dispersion is significant for 1-MHz measurements if the gate length exceeds ∼10 µm. Hence, interface state density measurements using the conductance technique need to use shorter gate-length devices in order to avoid this artefact.