A novel early gate dielectric AlGaN/GaNmetal–insulator–semiconductorhigh-electron-mobilitytransistors (MIS-HEMTs) process is reported. With the highqualitySi3N4 dielectric by low-pressure chemical vapordeposition and damage free, self-terminating passivationlayer etching at the gate area, the MIS-HEMTs on 150-mmSi substrate demonstrate excellent output performanceand good uniformity. The interface trap density betweenthe gate insulator and the barrier layer is as low as2 × 1012 cm−2 · eV−1 extracted by the conductancemethod. The MIS-HEMT fabricated on the wafer delivers anextremely small gate leakage current of 10−9 mA/mm anda high Ion/Ioff ratio of 1011. The subthreshold swing (SS) isaround 80mV/dec, and the saturated output current densityis 750 mA/mm. The dynamic on-resistance increases about42% at a quiescent drain bias of 600 V. The Vth shift is−0.63 and −0.89 V at a high temperature of 200 °C andnegative gate-bias stress of −25 V, respectively, indicatinga comparable stability with the state-of-the-art MIS-HEMTs.An excellent threshold voltage and SS uniformity (1 −  σ/μ)with the value of 94.5% and 95.2% are achieved on the150-mm wafer.

The compatibility of Au-free (Ti/Al/Ti/TiN)ohmic contacts in the gate-first double-metal (GFDM)process for AlGaN/GaN metal-insulator-semiconductorhigh-electron-mobility transistors (MIS-HEMTs) and Schottkybarrier diodes (SBDs) on the same 150-mm wafer wasinvestigated and discussed for the first time, including contactpre-treatments, Al diffusion in dielectric layers, and vias(contact windows between two metal layers) etching conditions.All of these steps are crucial to ohmic contacts as wellas overall AlGaN/GaN device fabrication process. With theoptimized ohmic contacts steps, not only an extremely lowohmic contact resistance (RC) value of 1.07 ·mm but alsoan excellent uniformity on the 150-mm wafer was obtained.The performance and uniformity of the MIS-HEMTs andSBDs based on the optimized GFDM process were alsodiscussed.

A further leakage reduction of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs with cap gate (CG-HEMTs) has been achieved by optimizing the gate structure and the gate etching process. The optimized CG-HEMTs single finger power HEMTs deliver IDSmax = 533 mA/mm at least with gate length of 0.5um and show a median gate leakage current of 20 nA/mm  25℃ measured at a drain voltage of 200 V. The breakdown voltage (BV) of CG-HEMTswas evaluated by the variation of drain-to-gate spacing (LDG) larger than 8 um. Furthermore, we show that the forward voltage of CG-HEMTs can be improved by shrinking the lateral dimension of the edge termination due to reduced series resistance.