As legacy silicon (Si) electronics approached their fundamental limits, researchers turned to wide bandgap semiconductors such as GaN in order to accomplish an improvement in size, weight, and power (SWaP) of radio frequency (RF) and power electronics. However, GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) suffer from premature breakdown and/or local hotspot formation due to the intense electric field concentration near the drain side corner of the gate under high voltage operating conditions. Therefore, electric field and thermal management solutions for GaN HEMTs have been actively sought for during the past decade.

In this work, a novel “resistive field plate” structure based on amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) was constructed to minimize the electric field concentration in GaN HEMTs. Coupled electro-thermal simulation, electrical testing, and optical thermography techniques were utilized to assess the improvement of the device electrical and thermal performance over GaN HEMTs employing traditional metal field plates. The breakdown voltage, current-voltage characteristics, and channel temperature of devices with no field plates, a gate field plate, a source connected field plate, a resistive field plate, and a combination of the three field plate structures were compared via modeling and experiments.

Knowledge obtained from this study facilitates electro-thermal co-design of GaN HEMTs for further optimization of state-of-the-art GaN device technologies and improvements in applications such as wireless communications, power conversion, and military radar systems.


Enhancement of the Electrical and Thermal Performance of Gan Hemts Using a Novel Resistive Field Plate Structure

Division / Sponsors: 
Electronic & Photonic Packaging Division (EPPD)

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/InterPACK/InterPACK2020/volume/84041

InterPACK2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.