Radiation hardness of WBG semiconductors to be tested
Penn State University has been awarded a grant to lead a Department of Defense study of the radiation hardness of wide-bandgap semiconductors, such as gallium nitride.
Materials such as GaN are being used increasingly in power semiconductor and RF applications. The United States Department of Defense wants to be able to predict and mitigate the damage caused to wide-bandgap semiconductors by radiation. It has awarded a team a five-year, $7.5 million grant to conduct a detailed study of the topic.
“Wide bandgap semiconductors, such as gallium nitride, have shown advantages over silicon in radio frequency and power electronics. They are also inherently more resistant to radiation due to stronger atomic bonds,” said Rongming Chu, an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Penn State, who will spearhead the project.
“Preliminary studies have indicated that the radiation resistance appears to be limited by defects in the semiconductors, rather than by the material’s intrinsic properties,” Chu said. “In this project, we seek to understand the radiation effects of these defects so that we may develop a strategy to redesign the wide bandgap semiconductor device for the ultimate radiation hardness.”
Defects
Typical defects are unwanted impurities, dislocation faults of the crystalline structure and dangling bonds at the interface between materials.
“There is a risk of these defects becoming electrically active under a high electric field, with energetic electrons, causing detrimental effects to device performance,” Chu said.
A multidisciplinary team is being drawn from across the universities of Penn State, Central Florida, Carnegie Mellon and Iowa. At Penn State, the team will leverage the tools and experts affiliated with the Radiation Science and Engineering Center and the Nanofabrication and Materials Characterization User Facilities at the Materials Research Institute.
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