This paper focuses on how to reduce the gate leakage current caused by plasma dry etching. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy （XPS） is employed to measure the AlGaN surface before and after etching. N vacancies are introduced, which cause that gate currents are not dominated by the thermal electron emission mechanism. N vacancies enhance the tunneling effect and reduce the Schottky barrier height as n-type doped in the etched AIGaN surface.A post-gate process for AlGaN/GaN HEMTs,annealing at 400℃ in a nitrogen ambient for 10min is introduced. After annealing, Ni atoms of gate metal reacted with Ga atoms of AlGaN, and N vacancies were reduced. The reverse leakage decreased by three orders of magnitude,the forward turn-on voltage increased and the ideality factor reduced from 3.07 to 2.08.
The accurate extraction of AlGaN/GaN HEMT small-signal models, which is an important step in largesignal modeling, can exactly reflect the microwave performance of the physical structure of the device. A new method of extracting the parasitic elements is presented, and an open dummy structure is introduced to obtain the parasitic capacitances. With a Schottky resistor in the gate, a new method is developed to extract Rg. In order to characterize the changes of the depletion region under various drain voltages, the drain delay factor is involved in the output conductance of the device. Compared to the traditional method, the fitting of S 11 and S 22 is improved, and fT and fmax can be better predicted. The validity of the proposed method is verified with excellent correlation between the measured and simulated S-parameters in the range of 0.1 to 26.1 GHz.
AlGaN/AlN/GaN high electron mobility transistor （HEMT） structures with a high-mobility GaN thin layer as a channel are grown on high resistive 6H-SiC substrates by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. The HEMT structure exhibits a typical two-dimensional electron gas （2DEG） mobility of 1944cm^2/（V·s） at room temperature and 11588cm^2/（V ·s） at 80K with almost equal 2DEG concentrations of about 1.03 × 10^13 cm^-2. High crystal quality of the HEMT structures is confirmed by triple-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. Atomic force microscopy measurements reveal a smooth AlGaN surface with a root-mean-square roughness of 0.27nm for a scan area of 10μm × 10μm. HEMT devices with 0.8μm gate length and 1.2mm gate width are fabricated using the structures. A maximum drain current density of 957mA/mm and an extrinsic transconductance of 267mS/mm are obtained.
With the principles of microwave circuits and semiconductor device physics, two microwave power device test circuits combined with a test fixture are designed and simulated, whose properties are evaluated by a parameter network analyzer within the frequency range from 3 to 8GHz. The simulation and experimental results verify that the test circuit with a radial stub is better than that without. As an example, a C-band AlGaN/GaN HEMT microwave power device is tested with the designed circuit and fixture. With a 5.4GHz microwave input signal,the maximum gain is 8.75dB,and the maximum output power is 33.2dBm.
Fabrication and characteristics of cascade connected AlGaN/GaN HEMTs grown on sapphire substrates are reported.The circuit employs a common source device,which has a gate length of 0.8μm cascode connected to a 1μm common gate device.The second gate bias will not only remarkably affect saturated current and transconductance,but also realize power gain control.Cascode device exhibits a slight lower of f T,a less feedback,a largely greater of maximum available gain and a higher impedance compare to that of common source device.
