In this paper, a further leakage reduction of AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diodes with gated edge termination (GET-SBDs) has been achieved by optimizing the physical vapor deposited TiN as the anode metal without severe degradation of ON-state characteristics. The optimized GET-SBD multifinger power diodes with 10 mm anode width deliver ∼4 A at 2 V and show a median leakage of 1.3 µA at 25 °C and 3.8 µA at 150 °C measured at a reverse voltage of −200 V. The temperature-dependent leakage of Si, SiC, and our GaN power diodes has been compared. The breakdown voltage (BV) of GET-SBDs was evaluated by the variation of anode-to-cathode spacing (L AC ) and the length of field plate. We observed a saturated BV of ∼600 V for the GET-SBDs with L AC larger than 5 µm. The GET-SBD breakdown mechanism is shown to be determined by the parasitic vertical leakage current through the 2.8 µm-thick buffer layers measured with a grounding substrate. Furthermore, we show that the forward voltage of GET-SBDs can be improved by shrinking the lateral dimension of the edge termination due to reduced series resistance. The leakage current shows no dependence on the layout dimension L G (from 2 to 0.75 µm) and remains at a value of ∼10 nA/mm. The optimized Au-free GET-SBD with low leakage current and improved forward voltage competes with high-performance lateral AlGaN/GaN SBDs reported in the literature.
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