A novel method for fabricating trench structures on GaN was developed. A smooth non-polar (1100) plane was obtained by wet etching using tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) as the etchant. A U-shape trench with the (1100) plane side walls was formed with dry etching and the TMAH wet etching. A U-shape trench gate metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) was also fabricated using the novel etching technology. This device has the excellent normally-off operation of drain current–gate voltage characteristics with the threshold voltage of 10 V. The drain breakdown voltage of 180 V was obtained. The results indicate that the trench gate structure can be applied to GaN-based transistors.

We fabricated a vertical insulated gate AlGaN/GaN heterojunction field-effect transistor (HFET), using a free-standing GaN substrate. This HFET has apertures through which the electron current vertically flows. These apertures were formed by dry etching the p-GaN layer below the gate electrodes and regrowing n À -GaN layer without mask. The HFET exhibited a specific on-resistance of as low as 2.6 mÁcm 2 with a threshold voltage of À16 V. This HFET would be a prototype of a GaN-based high-power switching device.

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We report a novel elasticity control technique for piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramics using an electric circuit that behaves as a “negative capacitor” (hereafter referred to as a negative-capacitance circuit) for application to sound shielding technology. A feature of this technology using an optimized negative-capacitance circuit is effective sound attenuation regardless of the PZT ceramic type or frequency ranges of the noise. In this experiment, we prepared three types of PZT ceramic with different dielectric and piezoelectric characteristics. We improved the circuit constants of negative-capacitance circuits for the three kinds of PZT ceramic with different physical properties. We measured the transmission loss attenuation factor of the three types of PZT ceramic in the frequency range from 1 to 100 kHz. We found that the transmission loss attenuation factors of all three types of ceramic were greater than 20 dB in the frequency range from 1 to 100 kHz.