Illumination effects on electrical characteristics of GaN/AlGaN/GaN heterostructures and heterostructure field effect transistors and their elimination by proper surface passivation
Journal article, 2012

The effect of ambient illumination is investigated for differently processed GaN/AlGaN/GaN heterostructure materials. For samples of the same material with different passivation, the difference in sheet resistance of illuminated and non-illuminated material can be as large as 130% (for annealed heterostructure without passivation) and as small as 3% (for heterostructure passivated with low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) silicon nitride). The time constant for the decay of the persistent photoconductance (PPC) is also very different for the differently processed samples. The majority of the effect on the conductance is from photons with energies between 3.1 and 3.7 eV. The investigation indicates that delayed recombination of electrons emitted from surface states and from deep level states in the AlGaN layer dominates the PPC. A theory is formulated by which the difference in illumination sensitivity for the differently passivated materials can be explained by different distributions of electrons between the channel two dimensional electron gas and an accumulation layer formed in the cap layer. For practical heterostructure field effect transistor (HFET) measurements, the illumination sensitivity is generally lower than that of the Hall measurements. Furthermore, HFETs fabricated with the LPCVD silicon nitride passivation are practically illumination invariant.

algan/gan heterostructures

mobility

persistent photoconductivity

collapse

gas

performance

temperature

hemts

current

Author

Martin Fagerlind

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Microwave Electronics

Niklas Rorsman

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Microwave Electronics

Journal of Applied Physics

0021-8979 (ISSN) 1089-7550 (eISSN)

Vol. 112 1 Art. no. 014511- 014511

Subject Categories

Physical Sciences

DOI

10.1063/1.4730782

More information

Created

10/7/2017