Aluminum gallium nitride / gallium nitride high electron mobility transistor fabrication and characterization

In the last decade, All-,GaXN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) have been intensively studied because their intrinsic electrical properties make them attractive for high power microwave device applications. Despite much progress, current slump continues to be a problem, limiting output power, reducing reliability, and complicating device modelling. In this work, a complete A~I-,G~,N/G~N HEMT fabrication procedure was developed, and electrical characteristics related to current slump, microwave modelling, and delay time analysis were explored. Low resistance ohmic contacts were achieved, enabling high channel current densities. Schottky contacts were developed with a new ion implant isolation architecture, enabling gate leakage currents 2 to 4 orders of magnitude lower than typical results from the literature. Through pulsed current-voltage measurements, the importance of bias stresses in the gate-source region was demonstrated for the first time. In contrast to the conventional "virtual gate" model, gate-source stresses were shown to be more important than gatedrain stresses when biased near threshold. Slow slump transients were studied by passivating transistor surfaces with ultrathin layers. These results excluded dielectric strain and electron injection reduction as viable passivation mechanisms. A novel model was proposed associating slow slump behaviour with trapping of many electrons at screw dislocation sites. The effect of slump on RF properties was examined through microwave measurements by extracting the parasitic source and drain resistances without special biasing. Besides significantly improving the accuracy of small-signal modelling, we were able to show the bias dependence of parasitic resistances which confirmed the effect of source-side bias stressing. The question of channel electron velocities in nitride transistors remains controversial. We determined an effective electron velocity of - 1.9 x 1 o7 cmls through two methods. We first extracted effective velocities through delay time analysis, and then through the small-signal model elements. To our knowledge, this was the first time an equivalent model extraction led to self-consistent electron velocity values for nitride transistors. Finally, our equivalent circuit model showed the correct interrelation between frequency response and access resistances. The cohesive picture of current slump, equivalent circuit model extraction, and delay time analysis gives a high degree of confidence in these results.