International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering &Technology (IJSRET) Volume 1 Issue1 pp 043-046 March 2012 www. ijsret.

org ISSN 2278 - 0882

HIGH ELECTRON MOBILITY TRANSISTOR (HEMT)

Gyan Prakash Pal Faculty of Electronics & Communication Engineering Department, Shanti Institute of Technology, Meerut (India) 2 Anuj Kumar Shrivastav Faculty of Engineering Physics (Applied Science) Department, Shanti Institute of Technology, Meerut (India)
Abstract The High Electron Mobility Transistor (HEMT) is an important device for high speed, high frequency, digital circuits and microwave circuits with low noise applications. These applications include telecommunications, computing and instrumentation. Instead of p-n junction, metalsemiconductor junction (reverse-biased Schottky barrier) is used, where the simplicity of Schottky barriers allows fabrication to close geometrical tolerances. There are particular speed advantages for MESFET devices in III-IV compounds such as GaAs or InP, which have higher mobilities and carrier drift velocities than Si. Keyword: HEMT, MESFET, GaAs, AlGaAs I. Introduction conductivity must be as high as possible. Obviously, the conductivity can be increased by increasing the doping in the channel and thus the carrier concentration. However, increased doping also causes increased scattering by the ionized impurities, which leads to a degradation of mobility. What is needed is a way of creating a high electron concentration in the channel of a MESFET by some means other than doping. A clever approach to this requirement is to be to grow a thin undoped well (e.g., GaAs) bounded by wider band gap, doped barriers (e.g., AlGaAs). This configuration, called modulation doping, results in conductive GaAs when electrons from the doped AlGaAs barriers fall into the well and become trapped there, as shown in figure 1(a). Since the donors are in the AlGaAs rather than the GaAs, there is no impurity scattering of electrons in the well. If a MESFET is constructed with the channel along the GaAs well, we can take advantage of this reduced scattering and resulting higher mobility. This effect is especially strong at low temperature where lattice scattering is also low. This device is called a modulation doped field-effect transistor (MODFET) and is also called a high electron mobility transistor HEMT).
1

By using GaAs instead of Si, higher electron mobility is available and furthermore GaAs can be operated at higher temperatures. Since no diffusions are involved in close geometrical tolerances can be achieved and the MESFET can be made very small. Gate lengths L 0.25 m are common in these devices. This is important at high frequencies, since drift time and capacitances must be kept to a minimum. It is possible to avoid the epitaxial growth of the ntype layer and the etched isolation by using ion implantation. Because of the relative simplicity of implanted GaAs MESFETs and the isolation between devices provided by the semi-insulating substrate, these structures are commonly used in GaAs integrated circuits. Since the metal-semiconductor field effect transistor (MESFET) is compatible with the use of III-V compound, it is possible to exploit the band gap engineering available with heterojunctions in these materials. In order to maintain high transconductance in a MESFET, the channel

Figure 1

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering &Technology (IJSRET) Volume 1 Issue1 pp 043-046 March 2012 www. ijsret.org ISSN 2278 - 0882
II. The High Electron Mobility Transistor

Recent advancement in the growth technology of III-V semiconductor heterojunctions have a new generation of electronic devices that depend on heterojunctions for their operation. In Figure 1(a) we have left out the band-bending expected at the AlGaAs/GaAs interfaces. We expect the electrons to accumulate at the corners of the well due to band bending at the heterojunction. In fact, only one heterojunction is required to trap electrons as shown in fig 1(b). Generally, the donors in the AlGaAs layer are purposely separated from the interface by 100 . Using this configuration, we can achieve a high electron concentration in the channel while retaining high mobility, since the GaAs channel region is spatially separated from the ionized impurities which provide the free carriers. In figure 1(b), mobile electrons generated by the donors in the AlGaAs diffuse into the small band gap GaAs layer, and they are prevented from returning to the AlGaAs by the potential barrier at the AlGaAs/GaAs interface. The electrons in the (almost) triangular well form a two-dimensional electron gas (2-DEG). Sheet carrier densities as high as 1012 cm-2 can be obtained at a single interface such as that shown in figure 1(b). Ionized impurity scattering is greatly reduced simply by separating the electrons from the donors. Also screening effects due to the extremely high density of two-dimensional electron gas can reduce ionized impurity scattering further. In properly designed structures, the electron transport approaches that of bulk GaAs with no impurities, so that mobility is limited by lattice scattering. As a result, nobilities above 250,000 cm2/V-s at 77 K and 2,000,000 cm2/V-s at 4K can be achieved. A schematic diagram showing the various GaAs and AlGaAs layers composing a HEMT active layer is shown in Figure 2. The HEMT, or MODFET, is also referred to as a two-dimensional electron gas FET (2DEG FET, or TEGFET) to emphasize the fact that conduction along the channel occurs in a thin sheet of charge. The device has also been called a separately doped FET (SEDFET), to emphasize the fact that the doping occurs in a separate region from the channel.

Figure 2: Schematic cross section of a HEMT structure

III. HeterojunctionHEMT versus MESFET

As like HEMT, the most widely used IIIV transistor for both microwave and high-speed digital applications was the GaAs metal semiconductor field effect transistor (MESFET). However, since electrons must transit through the doped channel in a MESFET, it does not take full advantage of the high mobilitys in GaAs. For comparison, the cross sections of a GaAs HEMT and a MESFET are shown in Fig. 3 and a comparison of their material properties are shown in Table 1. The model HEMT structure can be formed of two distinct semiconductor layers. The band gap difference results in the formation of conduction and valence band discontinuities at the layer interface or heterojunction creating a quantum well in the conduction band. The wider band gap semiconductor is doped with donors while the smaller band gap material is left undoped. The conduction band electrons move from the donor layer to the undoped layer forming a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) along the heterojunction. The band gap discontinuities are energy barriers spatially confining the electrons.

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering &Technology (IJSRET) Volume 1 Issue1 pp 043-046 March 2012 www. ijsret.org ISSN 2278 - 0882
High output resistance, Higher Schottky barrier height due to deposition of Schottky metal on AlGaAs instead of on GaAs,

HEMT devices have been used in the design of both (linear and nonlinear) hybrid and monolithic circuits. Circuit functions implemented include: amplifiers, mixers, frequency doublers, frequency converters, oscillators, switches, attenuators, and phase shifters. V. Conclusion

Figure 3: Cross Sectional diagrams comparing structures of an (a) AlGaAs/GaAs HEMT and a (b) GaAs MESFET Table 5-2 Material properties of conventional HEMT and GaAs MESFET structures

The advantages of a HEMT are its ability to locate a large electron density (1012 cm-2) in a very thin layer (<100 thick) very close to the gate while simultaneously eliminating ionized impurity scattering. The AlGaAs layer in a HEMT is fully depleted under normal operating conditions and since the electrons are confined to the heterojunction, device behavior closely resembles that of a MOSFET. The advantages of the HEMT over the Si MOSFET are the higher mobility and maximum electron velocity in GaAs compared with Si, and the smoother interfaces possible with an AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction compared with the Si/SiO2 interface. The higher performance of the HEMT translates into an extremely high cutoff frequency, and devices with fast access times. References [1] S. M. Sze, Physics of Semiconductor Devices, 2nd Ed., John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 122129,1985 [2] C. Kittel, Introduction to Solid State Physics, 2nd Ed., John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 360363, 1978 [3] S. Weinreb, R. Lai, N. Erickson, T. Gaier, and J. Wielgus, W-Band InP Wideband MMIC LNA With 30 K Noise Temperature, IEEE MTT-S Digest, pp. 101104, 1999 [4] E. H. C. Parker, ed., The Technology and Physics of Molecular Beam Epitaxy, Plenum Press, New York, New York, 1985 [5] K. H. G. Duh, W. F. Kopp, P. Ho, P-C. Chao, MY. Ko, P. M. Smith, J. M. Ballingall, J. J. Bautista, and G. G. Ortiz, 32-GHz Cryogenically Cooled HEMT Low-Noise Amplifiers, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 36, no. 8, pp. 15281535, August 1989 [6] K. L. Tan, 94-GHz 0.1-m T-gate Low-Noise

IV.

Advantages of using HEMT

Many of the advantages offered by HEMTs are: High electron mobility, Small source resistance, High gain-bandwidth product, fT , due to high electron velocity in large electric fields, High transconductance due to small gate-tochannel separation,

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International Journal of Scientific Research Engineering &Technology (IJSRET) Volume 1 Issue1 pp 043-046 March 2012 www. ijsret.org ISSN 2278 - 0882
Pseudomorphic InGaAs HEMTs, IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. 11, pp. 585587, December 1990 [7] R. Williams, Modern GaAs Processing Methods, 2nd Ed., Artech House, Boston, Massachusetts, and London, United Kingdom, 1990 [8] H. Fukui, Design of Microwave GaAs MESFETs for Broadband, Low- Noise Amplifiers, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol. MTT-27, pp. 643 650, July 1979 [9] J. Stenarson, Thesis: Microwave Transistor Noise Model Extraction Methods and A Non-contacting Scattering Parameter Measurement Method, Microwave Electronics Laboratory, Department of Microelectronics, Chalmers University of Technology, Gotenborg, Sweden, 2001 [10] R. Reuter, S. van Waasen, and F. J. Tegude, A New Noise Model of HFET with Special Emphasis on Gate-Leakage, IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. 16, no. 2, pp.7476, 1995 [11] J. Mateos, T. Gonzlez, D. Pardo, V. Hol, H. Happy, and A. Cappy, Improved Monte Carlo Algorithm for the Simulation of -Doped AlInAs/GaInAs HEMTs, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 250253, January 2000

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