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Demonstration of N-Polar GaN MIS-HEMT with High-k Atomic Layer Deposited HfO2 as Gate Dielectric

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Abstract

While SiN has been the choice of dielectric for N-polar GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs), high-k dielectrics need to be explored for thin-channel HEMTs to further increase the frequency of operation. In this work, we report N-polar metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS)-HEMTs with atomic layer deposited HfO2 as the gate dielectric. The device with gate width of WG = 2 × 50 μm, gate length of LG = 500 nm, gate-to-source distance of LGS = 400 nm, and gate-to-drain distance of LGD = 1.5 μm demonstrated a maximum drain current of 1 mA/mm with on-resistance of 1.28 Ω mm. A very low gate leakage of 10 nA/mm was measured in the on-state, which increased to 0.2 µA/mm with 11 V gate-drain voltage in the off-state. Pulsed-IV measurement revealed that there are two competing mechanisms at play, resulting in dispersion and anti-dispersion at the same time. The device demonstrated higher breakdown voltage compared to N-polar HEMTS with in situ metal–organic chemical vapor deposition SiN dielectric with similar two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) concentration. An fT/fmax of 19.1/69.5 GHz was measured on this device.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon reasonable request from the authors.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) (Program Manager: Dr. Paul Maki) through Grant No. N00014-20-1-2658. This work was performed in part at the University of Michigan Lurie Nanofabrication Facility (LNF), which is supported by the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. The data were presented previously at the 64th Electronic Materials Conference, 2022.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Subhajit Mohanty, Zhe Jian & Elaheh Ahmadi

  2. Department of Material Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Kamruzzaman Khan

  3. Applied Physics Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Elaheh Ahmadi

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  1. Subhajit Mohanty
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Mohanty, S., Jian, Z., Khan, K. et al. Demonstration of N-Polar GaN MIS-HEMT with High-k Atomic Layer Deposited HfO2 as Gate Dielectric. J. Electron. Mater. 52, 2596–2602 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-023-10222-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11664-023-10222-2

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