This letter reports a normally-OFF Al2O3/GaN gate-recessed MOSFET using a low-damage digital recess technique featuring multiple cycles of plasma oxidation and wet oxide removal process. The wet etching process eliminates the damage induced by plasma bombardment induced in conventional inductively coupled plasma dry etching process so that good surface morphology and high interface quality could be achieved. The fully recessed Al2O3/GaN MOSFET delivers true enhancement-mode operation with a threshold voltage of +1.7 V. The maximum output current density is 528 mA/mm at a positive gate bias of 8 V. A peak field-effect mobility of 251 cm(2)/V.s is obtained, indicating high-quality Al2O3/GaN interface.

A self-terminating gate recess etching technique is first proposed to fabricate normally off AlGaN/GaN MOSFET. The gate recess process includes a thermal oxidation of the AlGaN barrier layer for 40 min at 615 degrees C followed by 45-min etching in potassium hydroxide solution at 70 degrees C, which is found to be self-terminated at the AlGaN/GaN interface with negligible effect on the underlying GaN layer, manifesting itself easy to control, highly repeatable, and promising for industrialization. The fabricated device based on this technique with atomic layer deposition Al2O3 as gate insulator exhibits a threshold voltage as high as 3.2 V with a maximum drain current over 200 mA/mm and a 60% increased breakdown voltage than that of the conventional high electron mobility transistors.

AlGaN/GaN metal oxide semiconductor high electron mobility transistors (MOSHEMTs) with thick (>35 nm), high-kappa (TiO2/NiO), submicrometer-footprint (0.4 mu m) gate dielectric are found to exhibit two orders of magnitude in lower gate leakage current (similar to 1 nA/mm up to +3-V applied gate bias), higher I-MAX (709 mA/mm), and higher drain breakdown voltage, compared to Schottky barrier (SB) HEMTs of the same geometry. The maximum extrinsic transconductance of both the MOSHEMTs and the SBHEMTs with 2 x 80-mu m gate fingers is measured to be 149 mS/mm. The addition of the submicrometer-footprint gate oxide layer only results in a small reduction of the current gain cutoff frequency (21 versus 25 GHz, derived from S-parameter test data) because of the high permittivity (kappa approximate to 100) of the gate dielectric. This high-performance submicrometer-footprint MOSHEMT is highly promising for microwave power amplifier applications in communication and radar systems.

In this letter, we have demonstrated that the circular transmission linear model (Marlow's CTLM) is unsuitable for GaN HEMTs structure alloyed ohmic contact resistance evaluation. Very large spread is found in the extracted ohmic resistance values from measured data using the commonly used CTLM test patterns, and some of the contact resistances are found to be negative. We suspect that the stress induced by ohmic contact formation process is the culprit, preventing the use of CTLM test pattern for GaN HEMTs structure ohmic contact resistance evaluation, because of the strong piezoelectric induced polarization property of the hexagonal Ill-nitride heterojunction device structure. Meanwhile, measured ohmic contact resistance (R-c) and sheet resistance (R-sq) are found to exhibit good uniformity using a properly prepared linear transmission line model (LTLM) test pattern in which all the Gallium nitride material extended beyond the gaps between the ohmic contact electrodes are removed.

AlGaN/GaN metal-oxide-semiconductor high electron mobility transistors (MOSHEMTs) with thick (>30 nm), high-kappa (TiO2/NiO), submicron-footprint (0.4 mu m) gate dielectric on SiC substrate are demonstrated, which are found to exhibit low gate leakage current (similar to 1 nA/mm of gate periphery), high I-MAX (1 A/mm), and high drain breakdown voltage (188 V). The derived current gain cutoff frequency is 30 GHz (from S-parameter measurements). The output power density is 6.6 W/mm, and the associated power-add ed-efficiency is 46% at 2.5 GHz frequency and 50 V drain bias. This high performance submicron-footprint MOSHEMT is highly promising for microwave power amplifier applications in communication and radar systems.