| GaN material has been considered in recent years an attractive candidate for microwave power applications owing to its strong piezo-electric (PZ) and spontaneous polarization (SP) effects, high saturation velocity and wideband gap. AlGaN/GaN Heterojunction Field Effect Transistor (HFET) is chosen to overcome the disadvantages of low mobility in wide bandgap materials so that both high power and high speed are feasible.; Analysis and simulation are performed to understand the enhancement of sheet charge density due to the PZ and SP effects in the AlGaN/GaN material system. Major factors affecting the sheet channel charge density are discussed. To verify the PZ and SP charge effects, testing structures of AlGaN/GaN with various Al contents for Hall measurement are then fabricated. Results support our analysis.; GaN-based HFET devices with 25% Al content are fabricated after solving process issues. An external transconductance of 200 mS/mm, a saturation current density of 800 mA/mm and a breakdown voltage of 40 V to 50 V are achieved. A CW power amplifier with the output of 8 W at 9 GHz is achieved from a single 5 mm AlGaN/GaN HFET device.; A novel process, referred to as Gamma gate process, is developed to realize high breakdown performance as well as small gate length. As a result, a 0.3 μm gate length device with an integrated field plate is fabricated using 1 μm conventional optical lithograph techniques. Improvements of breakdown voltage and RF performance by a factor of over 2 have been achieved.; High temperature storage and measurement show that the AlGaN/GaN HFET devices can survive at an environment temperature as high as 592°C. The devices also survive after exposing to proton irradiation at a dosage of 1 × 1014 cm−2, indicating its intrinsic resistance to radiation. |
