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Characterization of AlGaN/GaN and AlGaN/AlN/GaN HEMTs in terms of mobility and subthreshold slope

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Abstract

This paper presents two structures of wide band gap high electron mobility transistor (HEMT). One structure is made-up of a stack of AlGaN layer over GaN layer. This structure is characterized by two-dimensional (2-D) electron gas layer formed at the interface of the AlGaN and GaN layers. The 2-D electron gas plays an important role in determining the carrier-mobility \((\upmu )\) and hence drain-to-source current \((I_\mathrm{DS})\) of HEMT. The other structure introduces an AlN spacer layer between the AlGaN and GaN layers to improve these characteristics. This paper compares the output characteristics curves \((I_\mathrm{DS}-V_\mathrm{DS})\) and transconductance characteristics curves \((I_\mathrm{DS}-V_\mathrm{GS})\) obtained from simulations performed using Silvaco \(\hbox {ATLAS}^\mathrm{TM}\). The modified structure with spacer layer shows improvements in carrier-mobility and hence drain-to-source current. This paper estimates and compares the subthreshold slope (SS) of the two devices. AlGaN/AlN/GaN HEMT offers an SS of 80 mV/decade whereas AlGaN/GaN HEMT offers an SS of 95 mV/decade. Thus, an improvement in SS of about 18.75 % is achieved in AlGaN/AlN/GaN HEMT compared to AlGaN/GaN HEMT. HEMT with spacer layer also offers 10\(\times \) improvement in \(I_{DS}\) as compared to HEMT without spacer layer. The proposed HEMTs achieve \(\approx \)3.19\(\times \) improvement in breakdown voltage, \(>\)1.3\(\times \) improvement in SS compared to HEMTs previously proposed in the literature.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India

    Santashraya Prasad, Amit Krishna Dwivedi & Aminul Islam

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  1. Santashraya Prasad
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  2. Amit Krishna Dwivedi
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  3. Aminul Islam
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Correspondence to Aminul Islam.

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Prasad, S., Dwivedi, A.K. & Islam, A. Characterization of AlGaN/GaN and AlGaN/AlN/GaN HEMTs in terms of mobility and subthreshold slope. J Comput Electron 15, 172–180 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10825-015-0751-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10825-015-0751-8

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