Thermoelectric Cooler-Driven Active Thermal Management for Enhanced Performance and Reliability of GaN Schottky Barrier Diode

Gallium nitride (GaN) devices face a severe self-heating bottleneck under high-power operation due to limited thermal conductivity, causing performance degradation and reliability risk. This work demonstrates the first integration of a thermoelectric cooler (TEC) with a lateral GaN Schottky barrier diode (SBD), achieving breakthrough enhancements in thermal management, electrical performance, and operational reliability. It is found that the TEC module can reduce junction-to-ambient thermal resistance (R${}_{\text {j-a}}\text {)}$of the lateral GaN SBD by 80% to 5.3K/W, slashing peak temperature from$97.9~^{\circ }$C to$33.5~^{\circ }$C at 2.5-W power dissipation, enabling stable 8-W operation, and tripling conventional power limits. Electrically, TEC integration enables record-lowon-resistance (R${}_{\text {on}}\text {)}$of$2.4~\Omega \cdot $mm, marking a 38.5% improvement, 21.7% higher forward current (I${}_{\text {on}}\text {)}$reaching 898.3mA at 5 V, and order-of-magnitude leakage suppression. Mechanistic analysis confirms TEC extends the thermionic-emission-dominant leakage regime while suppressing trap-mediated leakage pathways at elevated reverse biases. Crucially, under 4000-s forward voltage bias, the current degradation of TEC-cooled GaN SBD reduces by 80% to merely 1.8% compared to 9.1% for natural convection. High-voltageoff-state stress at −200 V further verifies 50% lower$\Delta $Rondegradation in TEC-cooled GaN SBD. These breakthroughs establish TEC cooling as a critical enabler for ultrahigh-power GaN electronics operating beyond intrinsic thermal limits.