Noise performance of back‐barrier engineered GaN‐based trigate HEMT for X‐band applications

Abstract

In this work, a comprehensive investigation on the noise performance of novel optimized back‐barrier engineered GaN based trigate HEMT (BB‐trigate HEMT), have been carried out using Sentaurus TCAD tool. The microwave‐frequency noise of the device has been analyzed using a Green's function approach, assessing the gate and drain noise spectral densities under different bias conditions such as off‐state, subthreshold state and on‐state condition. More importantly, the G‐R noise component in BB‐trigate HEMT is almost eliminated in comparison to conventional trigate HEMT (C‐trigate HEMT). This is due to use of AlGaN back‐barrier layer (BBL). Subsequently, for the first time, it is reported that the noise parameters such as noise resistance and overall noise figure are drastically reduced to ~22 mΩ and ~0.02 dB respectively at 10 GHz frequency for back‐barrier (BB) trigate HEMT having a scaled gate length of 100 nm. The proposed device shows prominent noise performance than conventional trigate HEMT and thereby, it is highly suitable for designing low noise amplifier for X‐band applications.