Effect of the non-annealed ohmic-recess approach on temperature-dependent properties of a metamorphic high electron mobility transistor

Abstract

The reliability-related properties of an InAlAs/InGaAs metamorphic high electron mobility transistor (MHEMT), using the non-annealed ohmic-recess (NAOR) approach, are studied and demonstrated. The NAOR device shows significantly improved dc and radio frequency (RF) performance over a wide temperature range (300-500 K). With a 1 × 100 μm 2 gate-dimension MHEMT by the NAOR approach, the considerably improved thermal stability and dc performances, including lower temperature variation coefficients on turn-on voltage (−1.38 mV K −1 ) and gate-drain breakdown voltage (−30.4 mV K −1 ), and on-resistance (2.41 × 10 −3 mm K −1 ), are obtained as the temperature is increased from 300 to 500 K. For RF characteristics, the NAOR device also shows a low degradation rate on drain saturation current operating regimes (−5.52 × 10 −4 K −1 ) as the temperature is increased from 300 to 400 K. In addition, based on the lifetime tests, an activation energy of 1.33 eV and a projected median lifetime of 1.2 × 10 7 h at T ch = 125 • C are obtained for the NAOR MHEMT.