This letter reports the small-signal and large-signal performances at high drain voltage (V DS ) ranging up to 60 V for a 0.5 µm gate length two-dimensional hole gas diamond metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor with a 100-nm-thick atomic-layer-deposited Al 2 O 3 film on a IIa-type polycrystalline diamond substrate with (110) preferential surfaces. This diamond FET demonstrated a cutoff frequency (f T ) of 31 GHz, indicating that its carrier velocity was reaching 1.0 × 10 7 cm/s for the first time in diamond. In addition, a f T of 24 GHz was obtained at V DS = −60 V, thus giving a f T × V DS product of 1.44 THz•V. This diamond FET is promising for use as a high-frequency transistor under high voltage conditions. Under application of a high voltage, a maximum output power density of 3.8 W/mm (the highest in diamond) with an associated gain and power added efficiency were 11.6 dB and 23.1% was obtained when biased at V DS = −50 V using a load-pull system at 1 GHz.

In this paper, we report on the effect of carboxyl- and amine terminations on a boron-doped diamond surface (BDD) in relation to pH sensitivity. Carboxyl termination was achieved by anodization oxidation in Carmody buffer solution (pH 7). The carboxyl-terminated diamond surface was exposed to nitrogen radicals to generate an amine-terminated surface. The pH sensitivity of the carboxyl- and amine-terminated surfaces was measured from pH 2 to pH 12. The pH sensitivities of the carboxyl-terminated surface at low and high pH are 45 and 3 mV/pH, respectively. The pH sensitivity after amine termination is significantly higher—the pH sensitivities at low and high pH are 65 and 24 mV/pH, respectively. We find that the negatively-charged surface properties of the carboxyl-terminated surface due to ionization of –COOH causes very low pH detection in the high pH region (pH 7–12). In the case of the amine-terminated surface, the surface properties are interchangeable in both acidic and basic solutions; therefore, we observed pH detection at both low and high pH regions. The results presented here may provide molecular-level understanding of surface properties with charged ions in pH solutions. The understanding of these surface terminations on BDD substrate may be useful to design diamond-based biosensors.

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Power semiconductor devices require low on-resistivity and high breakdown voltages simultaneously. Vertical-type metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) meet these requirements, but have been incompleteness in diamond. Here we show vertical-type p-channel diamond MOSFETs with trench structures and drain current densities equivalent to those of n-channel wide bandgap devices for complementary inverters. We use two-dimensional hole gases induced by atomic layer deposited Al2O3 for the channel and drift layers, irrespective of their crystal orientations. The source and gate are on the planar surface, the drift layer is mainly on the sidewall and the drain is the p+ substrate. The maximum drain current density exceeds 200 mA mm−1 at a 12 µm source-drain distance. On/off ratios of over eight orders of magnitude are demonstrated and the drain current reaches the lower measurement limit in the off-state at room temperature using a nitrogen-doped n-type blocking layer formed using ion implantation and epitaxial growth.

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