Effect of Electric Field On Electron Mobility in Sub-100 nm InAlN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors

Electron mobility is important for electron velocity, transport current, output power, and frequency characteristics. In conventional mobility extraction methods, electron mobility is usually extracted directly from the measured gate capacitance (CG) and current-voltage characteristics. When device gate length (LG) scales to sub-100 nm, the determination of CG becomes more difficult not only for the measure equipment but also the enhanced effect from parasitic capacitance. Here in this paper, the CG extracted from high-frequency small-signal equipment circuit is used for the InAlN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs). Electron mobility of the device with LG of 60-nm under VDS of 0.1 V and 10 V is extracted using two-dimensional scattering theory, respectively. The obtained results show that under a high electric field, the electron temperature (Te) and addition polarization charges (∆σ) increase, resulting in the enhanced polar optical phonon (POP) as well as polarization Coulomb field (PCF) scatterings and degradation of the electron mobility. This study makes it possible to improve the electron mobility by reducing Te and ∆σ for the InAlN/GaN HEMTs application.AlGaN/GaN heterostructure field-effect transistors with different gate lengths were fabricated. Based on the chosen of the Hamiltonian of the system and the additional polarization charges, two methods to calculate PCF scattering by the scattering theory were presented. By comparing the measured and calculated source-drain resistances, the influence of the different gate lengths on the PCF scattering potential was confirmed.