Characteristics of Al2O3/AlInN/GaN MOSHEMT

F. Medjdoub1, N. Sarazin2, M. Tordjman2, M. Magis2, M. A. di Forte- Poisson2, M. Knez3,

1
University of Ulm, Albert Einstein Allee 45, 89081 Ulm, Germany,
Email: [email protected]
2
Alcatel-Thales III-V Laboratory / TIGER, Marcoussis Cedex 91461, France.
3
Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Weinberg 2, D-06120 Halle, Germany
4
IEMN / TIGER, U.M.R.-C.N.R.S. 8520, 59652 Villeneuve d’ascq, France

Index terms: AlInN, MOSHEMT, Microwave

ABSTRACT: InAlN/GaN is a new heterostructure system for HEMTs with thin barrier layers and high channel

current densities well above 1 A/mm. To improve the leakage characteristics of such thin-barrier devices,

AlInN/GaN MOSHEMT devices with a 11 nm InAlN barrier and an additional 5 nm Al2O3 barrier (deposited

by ALD) were fabricated and evaluated. Gate leakage in reverse direction could be reduced by one order of

magnitude and the forward gate voltage swing increased to 4 V without gate breakdown. Compared to HEMT

devices of similar geometry, no degradation of the current gain cut-off frequency was observed. The results

showed that InAlN/GaN FETs with high channel current densities could be realized with low gate leakage

characteristics and high structural aspect ratio, by insertion of a thin Al2O3 gate dielectric layer.

INTRODUCTION: Recently, it has been shown that AlInN/GaN HEMTs could operate at high current

densities well above 1 A/mm, with high speed and at high temperature [1,2,3,4]. With 17 % In-content in the

barrier the heterostructure is lattice matched and highly stable, while barriers as thin as about 10 nm can be

used. These thin barriers might give rise to higher gate leakage current levels as compared to AlGaN/GaN

HEMT devices. This might be a limitation to the high voltage-high power operation, although the critical

breakdown field of InAlN should be higher than that of AlGaN. To improve the gate leakage in such HEMT

device structures thin oxide barriers could be inserted, resulting in a MOSHEMT structure. The insertion of

such a layer however might substantially degrade the structural aspect ratio, which is necessary to preserve the

gate control capability. The thin InAlN barriers allow the insertion of thin ALD deposited Al2O3-oxide layers,

while still maintaining a high aspect ratio. Such a structure will be discussed below. Al2O3 material offers the
advantages of a large band gap (> 9 eV), high dielectric constant (k~10), high breakdown field (~107 V/cm),

thermal stability (amorphous up to at least 1000°C) and chemical stability [5].

MATERIAL GROWTH AND DEVICE FABRICATION: An AIXTRON Metal Organic Chemical Vapor

Deposition system was used to grow AlInN/GaN on 2-inch diameter (0001) sapphire substrates. The studied

structures consisted of a 3 µm thick GaN buffer, a 1 nm thick AlN spacer layer and a 11 nm thick AlInN barrier

layer with 82% Al content measured by X-Ray Diffraction. Hall effect measurements at room temperature

showed a sheet carrier density NS = 1.9×1013 cm-2, a sheet resistance of 330 Ω/ and a mobility of 1230 cm2/Vs.

FETs were realized as follows: MESA isolation was performed by dry etching using argon plasma. For the

ohmic contacts, we used a Ti/Al/Ni/Au metal stack annealed at 870°C for 30 s. We obtained contact resistances

RC = 0.6 Ω.mm by TLM measurements. The drain-source distance was 3 µm. The wafer was divided in two

parts. The gate was deposited directly on the AlInN barrier layer (Fig. 1.a) of the first half wafer. Onto the

second half a 5 nm amorphous Al2O3 oxide layer was deposited by Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) prior to the

gate processing (Fig. 1.b). The ALD technique allows high quality ultra thin material deposition with atomic

layer accuracy. Ni/Au Schottky gates were defined by e-beam lithography with different lengths of 0.2 µm; 0.35

µm and 0.7 µm. The gate width was 100 µm. They were placed asymmetric between drain and source, 1 µm

apart from source contact. The devices were unpassivated.

DEVICE PERFORMANCE: Figure 2 shows the gate leakage current as a function of the gate-source bias of

the AlInN/GaN HEMTs and MOSHEMTs with identical geometry (0.2×100 µm2). As expected, the Al2O3

MOSHEMTs exhibit a lower gate leakage current density (about 1 order of magnitude) than the conventional

HEMTs. This leads to an increase of the two-terminal reverse breakdown voltage (about 25%) and of the

forward breakdown voltage (about 30%). This confirmed that the Al2O3 dielectric thin film acts as an efficient

gate insulator.

Figure 3 shows typical output characteristics of AlInN/GaN HEMTs and MOSHEMTs, respectively. The

HEMTs and MOSHEMTs were completely pinched-off at a gate voltage of -4 V and -8 V, respectively. The

negative shift in the threshold voltage was attributed to the decreased gate barrier capacitance. The experimental

threshold voltage for both HEMTs and MOSHEMTs were in good agreement with the values obtained from eq.

1, neglecting the residual doping in the InAlN barrier layer [6]:

where e is the electronic charge, ns is the sheet charge density and Cb is the total unit area capacitance of the

barrier layer and dielectric. The transconductance was reduced from 220 to 185 mS/mm. This was in agreement

with an estimated reduction of 20 %, assuming drift velocity saturation (at LG = 0.2 µm) with υsat = 5×106 cm/s.

The maximum drain current density was IDmax = 1.15 A/mm for HEMTs at VGS = +2 V. The moderate

maximum current density was mainly caused by the moderate sheet charge density. Above VGS = +2 V the gate

diode leakage current became pronounced as seen near the origin of the output characteristics. Thus, the

maximum output current was limited by the gate diode characteristics and not by the unpassivated channel part

between source and gate, which could act as a current limiter also degrading the transfer characteristics. In the

case of the MOSHEMTs, a low gate leakage current was observed up to VGS = +4 V. At this gate bias the

channel current was slightly increased to 1.3 A/mm, but the transfer characteristics showed increasingly gm-

compression. This indicates that the maximum channel current was now more limited by the channel cross

section between gate and source and less by gate leakage. This also allows to estimate the potential of the oxide

covered surface between gate and source to be very low (less than 0.3 eV). Further investigations will be

performed in order to extract the gate diode barrier height and the surface potential of both HEMTs and

MOSHEMTs more precisely.

Figure 4 depicts the current gain cut-off frequency as a function of 1/LG where LG is the gate length. An FT of

53 GHz could be extracted for a gate length of 0.2 µm. The FT×LG product calculated from the data points was

approx. 10.5 GHz.µm and independent of the device configuration. This indicates that the high aspect ratio of

both structures may allow to realize FETs with even shorter gate length without high frequency degradation.

The MOSHEMT structure presents the additional advantage of the suppression of gate leakage, which normally

increases as the gate length becomes shorter.

CONCLUSION: Al2O3/AlInN/GaN MOSHEMTs present a significant reduction of the gate leakage current, an

increase of the maximum drain current density by operating at high forward gate bias and no degradation of

small signal parameters compared to conventional AlInN/GaN HEMTs. A reduced transconductance of the

MOSHEMT was observed due to the used of identical heterostructure design. In order to further improve the DC
and RF characteristics of the MOSHEMT, the thickness of the AlInN barrier may be further decreased below 10

nm and the gate length reduced to maintain the structural aspect ratio.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This work is carried out in the frame of the European project UltraGaN (contract #6903). The

authors would like to thank all the members of the UltraGaN team for their contribution to the general progress in this field

and their stimulating and fruitful discussions. Special thanks are to Mr Y. Men from Ulm University for e-beam processing.
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Figure 1: Schematic cross section of the (a) AlInN/GaN HEMT structure (b) AlInN/GaN MOSHEMT structure

Figure 2: Gate leakage current versus gate-source voltage of the 0.2×100 µm2 AlInN/GaN HEMT and

MOSHEMT

Figure 3: DC ID-VDS characteristics at room temperature of a 0.2×100 µm2 AlInN/GaN HEMT and MOSHEMT

Figure 4: Current gain cut-off frequency according to the gate length of the AlInN/GaN HEMT and

MOSHEMT biased at a drain source voltage of 10V. The insert in the figure shows a typical cut-off frequency

of a 0.2×100 µm2 AlInN/GaN MOSHEMT