Investigation of Nitrogen-Based Plasma Passivation on GaN RF HEMTs Using Various Precursors
oleh: Qiaoyu Hu, Wei-Chih Cheng, Xiguang Chen, Chenkai Deng, Lina Liao, Wenmao Li, Yang Jiang, Jiaqi He, Yi Zhang, Chuying Tang, Peiran Wang, Kangyao Wen, Fangzhou Du, Yifan Cui, Mujun Li, Wenyue Yu, Robert Sokolovskij, Nick Tao, Qing Wang, Hongyu Yu
| Format: | Article |
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| Diterbitkan: | IEEE 2024-01-01 |
Deskripsi
This study investigates the DC and RF performance of RF GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) subjected to surface pretreatments by N<sub>2</sub> and N<sub>2</sub>O plasma. The filling of nitrogen vacancies or the passivation effect introduced by the thin GaON layer result in enhanced DC characteristics and RF performance for devices treated with nitrogen-based plasma. Compared to the untreated device, the device treated with N<sub>2</sub> plasma exhibited a significant improvement in performance, i.e., the saturated current increased by approximately 16%, the characteristic frequency (f<sub>T</sub>) had an increase of 27.6 GHz, the maximum oscillating frequency (f<sub>max</sub>) increased by 60.4 GHz. Furthermore, the breakdown voltage had a 10.7% increase, and the dynamic/static on-resistance ratio decreased from 1.34 to 1.18. These results highlight the potential of nitrogen-based plasma treatments in improving the performance of RF GaN HEMTs.