A Novel Atomic-Level Post-Etch-Surface-Reinforcement Process for High-Performance p-GaN Gate HEMTs Fabrication

Abstract

A novel atomic-level post-etch-surface-reinforcement (PESR) process is developed to recover the p-GaN etching induced damage region for high performance p-GaN gate HEMTs fabrication. This process is composed of a self-limited surface modification step with O2 plasma, following by an oxide removal step with BCl3 plasma. With PESR process, the AlGaN surface morphology after p-GaN etching was comparable to the as-epitaxial level by AFM characterization, and the AlGaN lattice crystallization was also recovered which was measured in a confocal Raman system. The electrical measurement further confirmed the significant improvement of AlGaN surface quality, with one-order of magnitude lower surface leakage in a metal-semiconductor (MS) Schottky-diode and 6 times lower interface density of states (Dit) in a MIS C-V characterization. The XPS analysis of Al2O3/AlGaN showed that the p-GaN etching induced F-byproduct and Ga-oxide was well removed and suppressed by PESR process. Finally, the developed PESR process was successfully integrated in p-GaN gate HEMTs fabrication, and the device performance was significantly enhanced with ~20% lower of on-resistance and ~25% less of current collapse at Vds,Q bias of 40 V, showing great potential of leverage p-GaN gate HEMTs reliability.