Vertical GaN-based transistors produce blocking voltage exceeding 1kV
Low resistance resulting in reduced power consumption and heating have attracted researchers to study GaN systems for nanoelectronics. Previous work has focused on laterally oriented GaN and AlGaN transistors, which readily provide a high mobility and low resistance. However these structures are limited in terms of the break-down and threshold voltage that can be achieved without compromising device size, which may make them unsuitable for automobile applications. Now the scientitst have shown how they can overcome the limitations.
A team led by Tohru Oka adopted the vertical orientation. Previous work has already shown that in this orientation the breakdown voltage can be increased by increasing the drift region thickness without compromising the device size. However, so far these structures have still been limited in the blocking voltage that the device can withstand while maintaining a low on-resistance.
“We redesigned the thicknesses and doping concentrations of channel and drift layers to reduce the resistances of the epitaxial layers while maintaining a blocking voltage of over 1.2 kV,” explained Oka and colleagues in the report of their work. They also use hexagonally shaped trench gates to increase the gate width per unit area thereby reducing the specific on-resistance. “These led to the excellent performance of 1.2-kV-class vertical GaN MOSFETs with a specific on-resistance of less than 2 mO cm2,” concluded the authors.
Reference
Tohru Oka, Tsutomu Ina, Yukihisa Ueno, and Junya Nishii 1.8mO-cm2 vertical GaN-based trench metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors on a free-standing GaN substrate for 1.2-kV-class operation. Applied Physics Express 8, 054101 (2015).
https://dx.doi.org/10.7567/APEX.8.054101
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