This letter reports on the improvement of the large-signal W-band power performance of nitrogen-polar gallium nitride deep recess high electron mobility transistors with the addition of a 40-nm-thick ex-situ silicon nitride passivation layer deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The additional passivation improves the dispersion control allowing the device to be operated at higher voltages. Continuouswave load pull measurements performed at 94 GHz on a 2×37.5μm transistor demonstrated an improvement in the peak power-added efficiency (PAE) to 30.2% with an associated output power density of 7.2 W/mm at 20 V drain bias. Furthermore, at 23 V, a new record-high W-band power density of 8.84 W/mm (663 mW) was achieved with an associated PAE of 27.0%.

Though GaN HEMTs have primarily been used for power amplification, they are also well suited for receiver applications. In the front-end of receivers, non-linearities, in particular third-order intermodulation products lead to in-band signal distortion. The intermodulation distortion is primarily dominated by transconductance and its derivatives. In this paper, we report on N-polar GaN MIS-HEMTs able to simultaneously achieve high gain (12.7 dB) and excellent linearity performance (OIP3/PDC of 15 dB) for low-power receiver application at 30 GHz. With a two-tone load-pull input-bias sweep, we demonstrate that the linearity of high performance HEMTs is sensitive to bias, and we present our measurement methodology to accommodate this.

In this letter, we report on the demonstration of a Mg-doped GaN/Al0.2Ga0.8N superlattice (SL) based depletion mode p-channel FinFET to improve the on current (ION). A two-step approach involving a dry etch followed by a Tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) wet etch was employed to obtain fins with minimum width of 50 nm using optical lithography. Normalizing current with fin height, an ION of 52 mA/mm and 110 mA/mm were achieved for 80 and 105 nm wide fins respectively.

This work presents recent progress in the W-band (94 GHz) power performance of N-polar GaN deep recess HEMTs grown on sapphire substrates. While SiC has been the substrate of choice to achieve the highest level of performance, sapphire substrates are a lower cost alternative. In this work we show that N-polar GaN deep recess HEMTs grown on sapphire match the power performance of a device on SiC up to 14 V with 5.1 W/mm of output power density. At 16 V the device on sapphire starts to suffer from thermal effects but still demonstrated 5.5 W/mm with an associated 20.6% power-added efficiency. This work also examines the impact of encapsulating the device in a low dielectric constant film often used for the implementation of a RF wiring environment.

In this study, the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition growth and electrical properties of N-polar modulation doped p-AlGaN/GaN superlattices (SLs) were investigated. Hole sheet charge density and mobility were studied as a function of the concentration of the p-type dopant Mg in the SL and the number of SL periods. Room temperature Hall measurements were carried out to determine the hole mobility and the sheet charge density. While the hole density increased with the increasing number of SL periods, the hole mobility was largely unaffected. Hole mobilities as high as 18 cm²/V s at a simultaneously high hole density of 6.5 × 10¹³ cm⁻² were observed for N-polar SLs with a Mg modulation doping of 7.5 × 10¹⁸ cm⁻³. For comparable uniformly doped Ga-polar SL samples, a mobility of 11 cm²/V s was measured. These results confirm the presence of abrupt Mg doping profiles in N-polar p-type GaN/Al_xGa_(1−x)N SL, allowing the demonstration of SLs with properties comparable to those of state-of-the-art Ga-polar modulation doped AlGaN/GaN SLs grown using molecular beam epitaxy. The lowest sheet resistance in the GaN/AlGaN material system of 5 kΩ/◻ is also reported. Test-structure transistors were also fabricated to investigate the applicability of these SL structures, with the planar device resulting in a current of 5 mA/mm and a FinFET structure resulting in a current of over 100 mA/mm.