Electron Trapping in Extended Defects in Microwave AlGaN/GaN HEMTs With Carbon-Doped Buffers

This paper investigates AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) fabricated on epistructures with carbon (C)-doped buffers. Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition is used to grow two C-doped structures with different doping profiles, using growth parameters to change the C incorporation. The C concentration is low enough to result in n-type GaN. Reference devices are also fabricated on a structure using iron (Fe) as dopant, to exclude any process related variations and provide a relevant benchmark. All devices exhibit similar dc performance. However, pulsed ${I}$ – ${V}$ measurements show extensive dispersion in the C-doped devices, with values of dynamic ${R}_{ \mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle ON}}~3$ –4 times larger than in the dc case. Due to the extensive trapping, the devices with C-doped buffers can only supply about half the output power of the Fe-doped sample, 2.5 W/mm compared to 4.8 W/mm at 10 GHz. In drain current transient measurements, the trap filling time is varied, finding large prevalence of trapping at dislocations for the C-doped samples. Clusters of C around the dislocations are suggested to be the main cause for the increased dispersion.