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IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 31, NO. 3, MARCH 2010

Normally Off GaN MOSFET Based on AlGaN/GaN Heterostructure With Extremely High 2DEG Density Grown on Silicon Substrate
Ki-Sik Im, Jong-Bong Ha, Ki-Won Kim, Jong-Sub Lee, Dong-Seok Kim, Sung-Ho Hahm, and Jung-Hee Lee, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractA normally off GaN MOSFET was proposed by utilizing an extremely high 2-D electron-gas density (> 1014 /cm2 ) at an AlGaN/GaN heterostructure as source and drain, which can be obtained by controlling the tensile stress accompanied with the growth of GaN on silicon substrate. The fabricated MOSFET with an Al2 O3 gate insulator exhibited excellent device performance, such as a threshold voltage of 2 V, drain current of 353 mA/mm, extrinsic transconductance of 98 mS/mm, and eld-effect mobility of 225 cm2 /V s. Index TermsGaN, MOSFETs, normally off, silicon substrate, 2-D electron gas (2DEG).

I. I NTRODUCTION IDE-BANDGAP AlGaN/GaN heterostructure eldeffect transistors are very attractive for high-power, high-frequency, and high-temperature applications [1][3] due to their superior properties, such as high breakdown electric eld and high saturation velocity. Furthermore, the high density (1013 cm2 ) of polarization-induced 2-D electron gas (2DEG) formed at an AlGaN/GaN heterointerface can render the devices to be applied to high current operation, but usually in normally on or depletion mode rather than normally off or enhancement mode [4]. For power switching applications, however, normally off device operation is very important to simplify the design of driving circuits and to reduce power loss during switching. Various technologies for developing normally off devices which utilize a Schottky junction gate [4][6] or a MOS gate structure [7][12] have been investigated. In general, normally off devices with Schottky gates exhibit larger current drivability and lower specic ON-state resistance (Ron ) than those with MOS gates. However, they suffer from relatively small threshold voltage (Vth ) and large gate leakage current, which deteriorate switching performance and limit forward gate voltage swing.
Manuscript received November 2, 2009; revised December 4, 2009. First published February 2, 2010; current version published February 24, 2010. This work was supported in part by the 2008 Brain Korea 21 (BK21) and in part by the Korean Government (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology) under the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation (KOSEF) Grants M10600000273-06J0000-27310 and 2009-0063400 and the World Class University Program R33-10055 through KOSEF. The review of this letter was arranged by Editor J. A. del Alamo. The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Kyoungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Korea (e-mail: ksim@ee.knu.ac.kr; hajb@ee.knu.ac.kr; kwbest@ee.knu.ac.kr; yisubi82@ gmail.com; gdolgun@ee.knu.ac.kr; shhahm@ee.knu.ac.kr; jlee@ee.knu.ac.kr). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LED.2009.2039024

Fig. 1. Schematic cross section of layer structure grown on silicon substrate and the proposed fully recessed GaN MOSFET. The stress in the GaN layer can be controlled by varying the thickness of the top transition layer.

For power switching, a MOS-type normally off device is therefore preferred in view of better noise performance and lower power consumption if the current drivability of the device can be improved by adopting an appropriate device structure and/or process. In this letter, we propose a normally off GaN MOSFET by utilizing the extremely high 2DEG density of 1014 /cm2 at an AlGaN/GaN heterointerface, grown on silicon substrate, as source and drain. For the gate structure, the AlGaN barrier is fully recessed and replaced by a high-quality atomic-layerdeposition (ALD) Al2 O3 gate oxide, which results in large drain current with very low Ron and relatively large extrinsic transconductance (gm ). II. G ROWTH AND D EVICE FABRICATION The AlGaN/GaN heterostructure for the proposed normally off GaN MOSFET was grown on silicon substrate, as shown in Fig. 1. The buffer layer of AlN (150 nm)/AlGaN (40 nm) was rst grown at high temperature. The bottom transition layer was then grown, which consists of ve stacks of low-temperaturegrown AlN (20 nm)/high-temperature-grown GaN (150 nm), followed by the growth of a top transition layer which consists of multiple stacks of AlN/GaN superlattice (60 nm)/GaN (150 nm). This top transition layer was used to control the stress in the GaN layer by varying the number of stacks, as discussed hereafter. A highly resistive GaN layer with thickness of 0.7 m and an Al0.3 Ga0.7 N barrier with thickness of 25 nm were subsequently grown to complete the growth. To fabricate the device, the active region of the device was dened by transformer-coupled-plasma reactive ion etching

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Fig. 2. 2DEG density and electron mobility versus biaxial tensile stress in the GaN layer grown on silicon substrate. Biaxial stress was measured from Raman spectroscopy, and 2DEG density and mobility were estimated from Hall measurement.

using a BCl3 /Cl2 gas mixture. The gate region was then fully recessed by the etching of a 25-nm-thick AlGaN layer and the additional overetching of a 25-nm-thick GaN layer with the same gas mixture. A 30-nm-thick Al2 O3 layer as gate insulator was deposited on the recessed GaN surface by ALD, followed by annealing at 800 C for 20 min in N2 ambient. After contact hole opening for the source and drain, Ta/Ti/Al/Ni/Au was deposited using an electron-beam evaporator, followed by rapid thermal annealing at 750 C for 30 s in N2 ambient. The Ni/Au for the gate metal was deposited using an electron-beam evaporator. The gate length dened by the recess width was 0.25 m, and the gate width is 42 m. The sourcedrain and gatesource distances are 6.8 and 1.5 m, respectively. III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION When a GaN layer is grown on silicon substrate, it experiences a strong tensile stress due to a large mismatch in the lattice constant and thermal-expansion coefcient between the two materials, which results in severe crack generation on the grown GaN surface if the growth thickness exceeds a critical thickness. However, it is possible to take advantage of this undesirable strong tensile stress for the purpose of obtaining high 2DEG density at the AlGaN/GaN heterointerface. The 2DEG density versus the tensile stress is shown in Fig. 2, where the tensile stress is measured by using Raman spectroscopy for each sample with different thicknesses grown on the top transition layer. As the thickness of the top transition layer decreases (or, equivalently, the tensile stress increases), the 2DEG density increases with a decreased mobility. By controlling the tensile stress without crack generation, we have obtained a 2DEG density as high as 1.8 1014 cm2 with a mobility of 120 cm2 V1 s1 from the Hall measurement for the as-grown sample, which is at least an order higher than that of a normal AlGaN/GaN heterostructure. To validate our measurement, the Hall measurement was performed at three different sites, and the results turned out to be almost the same with negligible measurement variation. Such a high 2DEG density cannot be obtained by considering polarizationinduced electron charge only. The strong tensile stress in the growth of the AlGaN/GaN heterostructure increases both spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization and hence increases the polarization-induced 2DEG density [13] by approximately

Fig. 3. (a) IV characteristics and (b) transfer curves of the fabricated GaN MOSFET.

three to four times higher than that observed from the normal AlGaN/GaN heterostructure, but still far below the value obtained in this letter. We believe that there are other tensilestress-related contributions to such a high 2DEG density. A possible explanation is the role of donorlike surface states at the AlGaN surface [14] which is also responsible for increasing the 2DEG. The Hall measurement, after depositing a 30-nmthick ALD Al2 O3 layer on the as-grown sample, exhibited that the 2DEG density decreases to approximately one-third of the original value. It is believed that this is because the Al2 O3 layer effectively passivates the AlGaN surface and hence decreases the 2DEG density, which indicates that the donorlike surface states at the free AlGaN surface are strongly related to a contribution to the increase in the 2DEG density. Further contributions may come from nitrogen vacancies and residual donors in the AlGaN layer. The extremely high 2DEG density was used as source and drain for our proposed device structure, as shown in Fig. 1, expecting that it can easily supply electrons from the source into the channel and also greatly reduce the parasitic and the on-resistance of the device. Fig. 3(a) and (b) shows the dc characteristics of the fabricated GaN MOSFET, which well demonstrates a normally off operation with a Vth of 2 V extrapolated from the transfer IV characteristics in the saturation region (Vd = 7 V). The maximum drain current (Idmax ) and the maximum gm were measured as large as 353 mA/mm with a small knee voltage of 5 V and 98 mS/mm, respectively. The on-resistance of the device was estimated to be as low as 9.7 mm in the linear region, which is relatively low compared with other results [8], [9]. The Idmax Lg product of the proposed device was 0.08825 mA, which is relatively high compared with other results [7][11] if measured at the

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IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 31, NO. 3, MARCH 2010

source and drain. The tensile stress in the GaN grown on silicon is responsible for controlling the 2DEG density. The fabricated GaN MOSFET exhibits a threshold voltage of 2 V, maximum drain current of 353 mA/mm, maximum extrinsic transconductance of 98 mS/mm, and eld-effect mobility of 225 cm2 /V s. These superior device performances are believed to be mainly due to both the AlGaN/GaN heterostructure source and drain with extremely high 2DEG density, which greatly improve the current drivability in the channel and the high-quality ALD Al2 O3 layer, which can be used as a good gate insulator. R EFERENCES
[1] T. P. Chow and R. Tyagi, Wide bandgap compound semiconductors for superior high-voltage unipolar power devices, IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 41, no. 8, pp. 14811483, Aug. 1994. [2] O. Akutas, Z. F. Fan, S. N. Fan, S. N. Mohammad, A. E. Botchkarev, and H. Morkoc, High temperature characteristics of AlGaN/GaN modulation doped eld effect transistors, Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 69, no. 25, pp. 3872 3874, Dec. 1996. [3] H.-C. Lee, S.-Y. Hyun, H.-I. Cho, C. Ostermaier, K.-W. Kim, S.-I. Ahn, K.-I. Na, J.-B. Ha, D.-H. Kwon, C.-K. Hahn, S.-H. Hahm, H.-C. Choi, and J.-H. Lee, Enhanced electrical characteristics of AlGaN/GaN heterostructure eld-effect transistor with p-GaN back barriers and Si deltadoped layer, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys., vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 28242827, Apr. 2008. [4] Y. Cai, Y. Zhou, K. J. Chen, and K. M. Lau, High-performance enhancement-mode AlGaN/GaN HEMTs using uoride-based plasma treatment, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 26, no. 7, pp. 435437, Jul. 2005. [5] S. Maroldt, C. Haupt, W. Pletschen, S. Muller, R. Quay, O. Ambacher, C. Schippel, and F. Schwierz, Gate-recessed AlGaN/GaN based enhancement-mode high electron mobility transistors for high frequency operation, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys., vol. 48, no. 4C, p. 04C 083, Apr. 2009. [6] Y. Uemoto, M. Hikita, H. Ueno, H. Mastsuo, H. Ishida, M. Yanagihara, T. Ueda, T. Tanaka, and D. Ueda, Gate injection transistor (GIT)A normally-off AlGaN/GaN power transistor using conductivity modulation, IEEE Trans. Electron Device, vol. 54, no. 12, pp. 33933399, Dec. 2005. [7] T. Oka and T. Nozawa, AlGaN/GaN recessed MIS-gate HFET with highthreshold-voltage normally-off operation for power electronics applications, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 668670, Jul. 2008. [8] H. Kambayashi, Y. Niiyama, S. Ootomo, T. Nomura, M. Iwami, Y. Satoh, S. Kato, and S. Yoshida, Normally off n-channel GaN MOSFETs on Si substrates using an SAG technique and ion implantation, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 28, no. 12, pp. 10771079, Dec. 2007. [9] W. Huang, T. Khan, and T. P. Chow, Enhancement-mode n-channel GaN MOSFETs on p and n-GaN/sapphire substrates, IEEE Electron Device Lett., vol. 27, no. 10, pp. 796798, Oct. 2006. [10] K. Matocha, T. P. Chow, and R. J. Gutmann, High-voltage normally off GaN MOSFETs on sapphire substrates, IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 610, Jan. 2005. [11] S. Sugiura, S. Kishimoto, T. Mizutani, M. Kuroda, T. Ueda, and T. Tanaka, Normally-off AlGaN/GaN MOSHFETs with HfO2 gate oxide, Phys. Stat. Sol. (C), vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 19231925, Dec. 2007. [12] Y. Irokawa, Y. Nakano, M. Ishiko, T. Kachi, J. Kim, F. Ren, B. P. Gila, A. H. Onstine, C. R. Abernathy, S. J. Pearton, C.-C. Pan, G.-T. Chen, and J.-I. Chyi, MgO/p-GaN enhancement mode metaloxide semiconductor eld-effect transistors, Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 84, no. 15, pp. 29192921, Apr. 2004. [13] O. Ambacher, J. Smart, J. R. Shealy, N. G. Weimann, K. Chu, M. Murphy, W. J. Schaff, L. F. Eastman, R. Dimitrov, L. Wittmer, M. Stutzmann, W. Rieger, and J. Hilsenbeck, Two-dimensional electron gases induced by spontaneous and piezoelectric polarization charges in N- and Ga-face AlGaN/GaN heterostructures, J. Appl. Phys., vol. 85, no. 6, pp. 3222 3233, Mar. 1999. [14] J. P. Ibbetson, P. T. Fini, K. D. Ness, S. P. DenBaars, J. S. Speck, and U. K. Mishra, Polarization effects, surface states, and the source of electrons in AlGaN/GaN heterostructure eld effect transistors, Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 250252, Jul. 2000.

Fig. 4. (a) Calculated eld-effect mobility and (b) breakdown characteristic of the fabricated GaN MOSFET. The inset shows the gate leakage characteristic of the device.

same bias condition. These superior device characteristics are mainly related to the fact that the extremely high 2DEG density in the source and drain not only plays a role as a good electron supplier into the channel but also greatly decreases the parasitic series resistances in the source and drain as aforementioned. The maximum eld-effect mobility of 225 cm2 /V s was extracted in the linear region (at Vd = 0.1 V), as shown in Fig. 4(a), which is the highest value ever reported for the GaN MOSFET, and the extracted subthreshold slope was 317 mV/dec, which is comparable to the values reported by others [7][10]. The gate leakage current of the device was measured as low as 107 A/mm at Vg = 6 V, as shown in the inset of Fig. 4(b). These conrm that the annealed ALD Al2 O3 layer can be used as a good gate insulator and that the surface state density formed at the interface between the annealed Al2 O3 gate oxide and the GaN surface is sufciently low to effectively modulate the channel current. The OFF-state breakdown voltage of the device is about 40 V at a gate bias voltage of 0 V, which is relatively low and can be expected from the fact that the 2DEG density in the drain is very high. The breakdown voltage can be improved by applying multiple gate recess or using eld plate. IV. C ONCLUSION We have successfully demonstrated a fully recessed normally off GaN MOSFET with extremely high 2DEG density at the AlGaN/GaN heterointerface, grown on silicon substrate, as