Proton irradiation effects on buffer-free gallium nitride on silicon carbide high electron mobility transistor-based radio frequency power amplifier

Abstract

In this work, a comprehensive technology computer aided design-based investigation of a buffer-free high electron mobility transistor under proton radiation is presented. With a 37.55% thinner architecture (without thick and highly doped Fe buffer) grown on silicon carbide substrate, this device design improves the two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) confinement and helps to eliminate the various dispersion effects and buffer leakage. To gain better insight into the buffer-free device architecture, direct current (DC), thermal, and radio frequency (RF) studies are carried out. To establish the various prospects of this device in high-power and space applications, the performance of the device under 1.8 MeV proton radiation environment is systematically studied. A comparison demonstrates that the buffer-free structure under proton radiation with fluence 1 × 10 14 c m − 2 shows a current I D , M a x degradation of 18.68% compared with 72.7% in the case of conventional architecture. The excellent capability of the buffer-free device to confine 2DEG more precisely even under radiation environments can be concluded from the various DC and RF parameters studied. An extensive study of the effects of proton fluences and biases on the RF power amplifier figures of merit was also conducted by carrying out harmonic balance simulations for different radiation setups, which demonstrates excellent performance of the buffer-free structure.

Multilayer perceptron–random forest based hybrid machine learning–neural network model for GaN high electron mobility transistor's parameter estimations

“…There exists different topologies for PA design. 12,19,[99][100][101] Since the focus of this work is to explore the model performance in predicting the device's power, one of the widely used topology is adopted. This is to highlight that the proposed methodology of PA designing has been validated with experimental results 11,12 and is found the characterize the impact of other parameters like bias and so forth, thus justifies the power design method so used.…”

“…12,19,[99][100][101] Since the focus of this work is to explore the model performance in predicting the device's power, one of the widely used topology is adopted. This is to highlight that the proposed methodology of PA designing has been validated with experimental results 11,12 and is found the characterize the impact of other parameters like bias and so forth, thus justifies the power design method so used. In this work, a class AB PA was designed in Keysight ADS for X-band (f O = 10 GHz), and repetitive load pull simulations were carried out to find the optimum stability and matching networks.…”

“…Several novel device configurations like NbN gated HEMTs, 8 tri‐gate junction HEMTs (tri‐JHEMTs), 9 p‐n junction (PNJ) HEMTs 10 have been introduced. Improvement in 2DEG confinement and reduction in dispersion effects and buffer leakage by removing the heavily doped buffer layer from the device stack has also been explored 11,12 . Xin et al 13 have demonstrated a novel self‐triggered discharging channel in power p‐GaN HEMTs wherein a current‐limiting resistor and a proportional amplification resistor were utilized to improve the gate‐to‐source electrostatic discharge (ESD) robustness.…”

“…Improvement in 2DEG confinement and reduction in dispersion effects and buffer leakage by removing the heavily doped buffer layer from the device stack has also been explored. 11,12 Xin et al 13 have demonstrated a novel self-triggered discharging channel in power p-GaN HEMTs wherein a current-limiting resistor and a proportional amplification resistor were utilized to improve the gate-to-source electrostatic discharge (ESD) robustness. A novel Π-gate architecture was presented by Alvaro et al, 14 which is proved to have a better thermal and reliable RF performance.…”

Interplay Between γ–Ray Irradiation and 3DEG for Dosimeter Applications

“…A close observation into the cases compiled in Table I calls for a principal requirement for detecting ionizing radiations at a low and high dose to avoid the system failure due to a drift in the operating conditions [33][34][35]. There have been attempts made to utilize GaN HEMTs as a comparator to detect ionizing radiations [36], thin film GaN HEMTs for the detection of X -Rays [37], ultrahigh gain AlGaN/GaN HEMTs for the detection of X -Rays and Protons [38] [39], or an attempt to utilize intrinsic properties of GaN to realize Schottky diodes for the detection of α -Particles [40].…”