Industrial Technologies For III-Nitride-Based Electronics

Abstract

The industrial level technologies including molecular beam epitaxy and submicron planar processing are developed to realize novel electron devices based on III-nitride multilayer heterostructures. Wide conditions range available on growth equipment used as well as flexible heterostructure designs allows controlling of device oriented material properties. For microwave applications, thick AlN "templates" grown at extremely high (up to 1100°C) substrate temperature in conjunction with multilayer transition region design both provide low dislocation density in the order of 10 8 cm -2 . The strong carrier confinement in two-dimensional electron gas for collapse-free transistor operation is provided by placing GaN channel between AlGaN barriers of various Al content, keeping high sheet conductivity of 260-320 Ohm/square. Based on these heterostructures a number of power amplifiers for L-, S-, C-and X-band are realized. For various types of bulk acoustic resonators, stress-controlling technology of AlN/GaN layers having high depth uniformity on Si substrates is also developed.