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Investigation of Impact of Passivation Materials on the DC/RF Performances of InP-HEMTs for Terahertz Sensing and Imaging

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Abstract

In this work, the effectiveness of various dielectric passivation materials such as SiO2, Si3N4, Al2O3 and Si3N4/Al2O3 on the DC & RF behaviour of InP-HEMT (High Electron Mobility Transistor) was analyzed using TCAD (Sentaurus) tool. The InP HEMT structure used in this work features a novel T-Gate structure with Pt sinking technology to alleviate short channel effects (SCEs), double-Si-δ-doping technique to improve the 2-dimensional charge density in the quantum well (QW) and n+-doped In0.52Ga0.48As drain-source (D-S) areas to effectively minimize the D/S parasitic resistance (RD and RS). The simulations carried out at 300 K using hydro-dynamic (HD) carrier transport model indicate that 25 nm gate length InP HEMT with Si3N4/Al2O3 composite dielectric passivation layer provides the highest transconductance (2814 mS/mm), drain current (1210 mA/mm), cut-off frequency (688 GHz) and maximum oscillation frequency (1340 GHz) compared with other dielectric passivation materials and this is attributed to the minimization of parasitic capacitances due to the improved surface quality of the device. InP HEMTs have been considered as an excellent transistor technology for future high speed wireless/optical communication systems, radiometry and deep space communication systems, sensing and imaging and high speed IC applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SNS College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India

    J. Ajayan & P. Mohankumar

  2. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India

    D. Nirmal & L. Arivazhagan

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  1. J. Ajayan
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  2. D. Nirmal
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  3. P. Mohankumar
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  4. L. Arivazhagan
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Correspondence to D. Nirmal.

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Ajayan, J., Nirmal, D., Mohankumar, P. et al. Investigation of Impact of Passivation Materials on the DC/RF Performances of InP-HEMTs for Terahertz Sensing and Imaging. Silicon 12, 1225–1230 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12633-019-00226-1

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