Electrical degradation on DC and RF characteristics of short channel AlGaN/GaN-on-Si hemt with highly doped carbon buffer

In this study, we investigated the effects of highly doped carbon (C) buffer on the microwave performance of AlGaN/GaN-on-Si high electron mobility transistor (HEMT).We fabricated AlGaN/GaN-on-Si HEMTs with two different buffer structures. One structure had an un-doped buffer layer and the other structure had C-doped buffer layer with the doping concentration of ~1 × 10¹⁹ cm ⁻³ with GaN channel thickness of 350 nm. Despite higher leakage current, the device fabricated on the un-doped buffer structure exhibited better transfer and current collapse characteristics which, in turn, resulted in superior small-signal characteristics and radio frequency (RF) output power. Photoluminescence and secondary ion mass spectrometry measurements were carried out to investigate the effects of the highly-doped C buffer on microwave characteristics.