Scaling Study on High-Current Density Low-Dispersion GaN Vertical FinFETs

Abstract

GaN vertical FinFETs on a bulk GaN substrate were fabricated with various fin widths and 400 ns pulsed I-V measurements were performed to investigate their self-heating and DC-RF dispersion. With low-temperature post-gate processes including Ar plasma-enhanced Ohmic contact, a high drain current density ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&gt;$ </tex-math></inline-formula> 175 kA cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{-{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) and a low gate leakage ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&lt; 1\times 10^{-{17}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> kA cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{-{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) could be achieved simultaneously. When normalized by the active fin area, the specific on-resistance was 0.030 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm2 at the drain on-current of 119 kA cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{-{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> for the 300 mm fin-width single-finger device. A 25-finger device with the same fin width and fin-to-fin pitch of 3 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> showed the on-resistance of 0.043 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm2 (0.43 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{m}\Omega $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm2 when normalized by the total device area of 6000 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}^{{2}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ), which was one of the lowest values reported. Low DC-RF dispersion was observed for the devices more than 2.5 mm away from the wafer edge. This study also reports that more influence of self-heating was observed as the fin width scaled down or the number of fingers increased.