High temperature electron transport properties in AlGaN/GaN heterostructures

Hall electron mobility (mu(H)) and sheet concentration (n(s)) in AlGaN/GaN heterostructures have been measured from 77 to 1020 K. The effect of the deposited Al2O3 layer is also investigated with varying its thickness. It is found that mu(H) decreases monotonously with the temperature (T) and its dependence is well approximated with the function of mu(H) = 4.5 x 10(3) exp(-0.004T) in the temperatures over 350 K. The function is different from the commonly used one of mu(H) = AT(-alpha) (alpha similar to 1.5), which indicates that the mobility is not only governed by the polar optical phonon scattering but also the deformation potential scattering plays a role. The sheet electron concentration (n(s)) has a weak dependence on the temperature, that is, slightly decreases with temperature in 300-570 K and increases gradually up to 1020 K. The decrease is explained by considering the reduction in the polarization (probably both spontaneous and piezoelectric) charge and the increase seems to be due to the parallel conduction through the interface between GaN buffer layer and sapphire substrate. The dependence of sheet resistance (R-sh) in AlGaN/GaN is compared with that of n-GaN. In the low temperatures, AlGaN/GaN shows a lower R-sh due to its high mobility, however, at the temperatures higher than 350 K, R-sh of AlGaN/GaN becomes higher than that of n-GaN. This result implies that AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility-transistors are inferior to GaN metal-semiconductor field-effect transistors in terms of higher source, drain, and channel resistances at high temperature operations, although further investigations on other performances such as output power and reliability are needed. The Al2O3 deposited AlGaN/GaN shows about 15% higher n(s) than without Al2O3 layer for the whole temperatures. On the contrary, mu(H) at 77 K shows a slight decrease with Al2O3 deposition, which degree is not affected by the layer thickness. In the temperatures higher than 400 K, mu(H) is almost the same for with and without Al2O3 layer. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3514079]