We report on the dc characteristics and microwave performance of AlGaN/GaN heterostructure field effect transistors in the temperature range from 25 to 300 °C. At temperatures above 200 °C, we observe the temperature activated shunt conductance which is independent of the gate voltage (the activation energy is 0.505 eV). The cutoff frequency and the maximum frequency of oscillations vary from 22 and 70 GHz at 25 °C to 5 and 4 GHz at 300 °C, respectively. The gate leakage current in the range of gate biases from −4 to +1 V is small and nearly proportional to the gate voltage even at 300 °C. At temperatures above 200 °C, the gate leakage current is temperature activated (the activation energy is 0.88 eV). These results show that deep traps strongly affect the AlGaN/GaN characteristics at elevated temperatures.
We fabricated a 0.25 μm gate length AlGaN/GaN heterostructure field effect transistor (HFET) with a maximum extrinsic transconductance of 27 mS/mm (at room temperature) limited by the source series resistance. The device exhibited an excellent pinch-off and a low parasitic output conductance in the saturation regime. We measured the cutoff frequency fT and the maximum oscillation frequency fmax as 11 and 35 GHz, respectively. These values are superior to the highest reported values for field effect transistors based on other wide band-gap semiconductors such as SiC. These results demonstrate an excellent potential of AlGaN/GaN HFETs for microwave and millimeter wave applications.
Implanted ohmic contacts were made on molecular beam epitaxy grown GaN materials. Si was implanted at a doping density of about 4×1020 cm-3 to decrease the contact resistance of the contact, followed by an activation anneal at 1150 °C for 30 s. The overlay metal Ti/Au was evaporated. Four-probe measurements were performed on transmission line model patterns. The measured maximum contact resistance was 0.097 Ω mm and the apparent specific contact resistance was 3.6×10−8 Ω cm2.
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