Thermal modeling and measurement of GaN-based HFET devices

In this letter, we present our thermal study results of GaN-based heterojunction field effect transistors (HFETs). In thermal computation, PAMICE code was used to calculate temperatures in a three-dimension (3-D) model. In the thermal measurement, nematic liquid crystal thermography was employed to determine the peak temperature on the surface of the device chip. The calculated and directly measured temperatures agree well. These methods are valuable in predicting the thermal performance of GaN-based HFET devices, in particular the power devices.