A room temperature HEMT process for AlGaN/GaN heterostructure characterization

Journal article, 2009

A simple, room temperature, AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) process is presented. The process consists of only two steps which can be performed by hand. The first step is to deposit gallium (Ga) metal for ohmic contacts, which without thermal processing have a specific contact resistivity ρ_c=0.10 Ohm cm2. Silver (Ag)-based conductive paint is then deposited to form a Schottky contact. The simplicity of the process facilitates fast fabrication and characterization of HEMTs, without unwanted effects on the material. The process is useful for initial material characterization and screening. The process is also found to be a useful tool for process monitoring of the conventional HEMT micro-fabrication process by detecting material/process quality problems. In this work the process is used for initial material characterization and screening, where a leaky buffer can easily be detected. The process is also used to identify the ohmic contact annealing as a potentially damaging step in a conventional micro-fabrication process. A decrease in the electron sheet carrier concentration and an increase of leakage currents are measured after annealing.