Characteristics of H-terminated single crystalline diamond field effect transistors

Diamond has been considered as an ultimate semiconductor, which has great potential applications in high power, high frequency semiconductor devices. Up to now, the twodimensional hole gas (2DHG) induced on the hydrogenterminated diamond surface is used most popularly to form electric conduction in diamond semiconductor at room temperature, due to the obstacle caused by lacking of easily-ionized dopants. A 200-nm-thick single crystalline diamond is grown by microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition on the type-Ib high-pressure high-temperature synthesized diamond substrate. Then the sample is treated in hydrogen plasma atmosphere to achieve hydrogen terminated diamond surface. The sample is characterized by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and atomic force microscope. After that, the normally-on hydrogen-terminated diamond field effect transistors are achieved. The device with a gate length of 2 μup m delivers a saturation leakage current of 96 mA/mm at gate voltage VGS=-6 V, at which, however, the gate leakage current is too large. The saturation current reaches 77 mA/mm at VGS=-3.5 V with safety. The device shows typical long-channel behavior. The gate voltage varies almost linearly. In the saturation region of the device, the transconductance (gm) increases near-linearly to 30 mS/mm with the increase of the gate voltage in a range of 5.9 V. Analyses of the on-resistance and capacitance-voltage (C-V) data show that the 2DHG under the gate achieves a density as high as 1.99×1013 cm-2, and the extracted channel carrier density and mobility are always kept increasing with VGS negatively shifting to -2.5 V. The nearlinearly increasing of gm in a large VGS range is attributed to high 2DHG density, quite a large gate capacitance (good gate control), and increased mobility. The relevant researches of improving the carrier mobility in the channel and of finding proper gate dielectrics to improve the forward gate breakdown voltage are underway.