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AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) are the most advanced electronic nitride devices to be used at high temperatures and in harshly radiated environments. A clear understanding of radiation effects on these devices is essential in order to predict their behavior in space and terrestrial applications including military, nuclear and high energy physics. Only a limited amount of insight exists into the behavior of III-N based junction transistor after exposure to gamma irradiation. Investigation of gamma-irradiated device properties will provide important information about the defects in semiconductor heterostructures. Therefore, it is important to understand how defects are created by gamma-rays and how they can be healed by annealing. Here we present the impact of gamma-irradiation on AlGaN/GaN heterostructures fundamental properties including carrier transport and recombination. We also report the effect of annealing at 200o C over 25 min on gamma-irradiated samples through monitoring of minority carrier diffusion length using Electron Beam Induced Current (EBIC) method. We found the relationship between dose, diffusion length and its activation energy after gamma-irradiation and after annealing treatment. Temperature dependent EBIC measurements yielded a decrease in diffusion length with corresponding increase in activation energy after the gamma-irradiation.The increase in activation energy is likely an indication of the creation of deeper gamma irradiation induced defect traps due to nitrogen vacancies. These deep traps reduce the carrier concentration and mobility and increase the activation energy related to carrier recombination. It is evident from our results that annealing of HEMTs that were gamma-irradiated with moderate dose leads to the recovery (depending on dose) of minority carrier diffusion length. The recovery is also reflected in the activation energy returning to its pre-irradiated value. The level of recovery of gamma-irradiated devices after annealing treatment depends on the dose of irradiation. Increase in diffusion length after annealing had been attributed to a reduction in point defects (nitrogen vacancies) induced in AlGaN/GaN by gamma-irradiation.

AlGaN/GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) show great promise for applications such as military radar and satellite-based communications systems. Due to the applications in extreme radiation environments, it is important to characterize the performance after irradiation. There are many studies characterizing the performance under proton, neutron, and electron irradiations for AlGaN/GaN HEMTs. However, the studies for gamma irradiation are limited. Detailed studies are needed to characterize the performance of HEMTs after gamma irradiation. In this study, we characterize the DC performance after irradiation and extract the change of Vth, carrier concentration, mobility and resistance. Also, we use gate lag measurement and drain pulse measurement to characterize the defects generated after irradiation. AlGaN/GaN HEMT heterostructures were grown on c-plane sapphire by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The layer structure included a thin AlGaN nucleation layer followed with a 2 µm thick undoped GaN buffer topped by a 25 nm thick unintentionally doped Al0.28GaN layer. Mesa isolation was achieved by using an inductively coupled plasma system with Ar/Cl2-based discharges. The Ohmic contacts were formed by lifting-off e-beam evaporated Ti (200 Å)/Al (1000 Å)/Ni (400 Å)/Au (800 Å). 1-µm gates were defined by lift-off of e-beam deposited Ni/Au metallization. The contacts were annealed at 850°C for 45 s under a flowing nitrogen ambient in Heatpulse 610T system. The final step was deposition of e-beam evaporated Ti/Au (300 Å/1200 Å) interconnection contacts. Devices were exposed to 60Co γ-rays with different doses of 50, 300, 450, or 700 Gy. Irradiations were performed at temperatures As shown in Figure 1, IDSS after irradiation was increased from 293mA/mm to 339mA/mm after irradiation. The increase of IDSSincreases with dose before 450 Gy and saturates after that. From the transmission line method (TLM), there is no significant change in sheet resistance after irradiation. However, the device total resistance, the reciprocal of the current current voltage (I-V) curve slope in the lower drain bias voltage, decreased significantly, as illustrated in Figure 1. The total resistance consisted of the channel resistance and the source resistance as well as the drain resistance. Both The source resistance and the drain resistance determined from the transmission line method change less than 2%. While the channel resistance decreased around 5% as shown in Figure 2. The reduction of the channel resistance was mainly due to the increase of mobility and carrier concentration, which were extracted from the drain IV curve in the low field region and TLM data. Kurakin et. al 1 found a similar effect that mobility increases after irradiation due to the relaxation of strain. Berthet et. al 2 attributed the drain current increases after irradiation to the introduction of donor type defects through the implantation. From gate lag measurement, the dispersion of the drain current measured at 100kHz increased as a function of the gamma irradiation dose indicating additional traps generated between gate and drain electrode and enhanced the current collapse. There was no obvious current dispersion during the drain pulse measurement showing the defects created by the gamma irradiation were less than the original defects through the material growth in the buffer layer. In conclusion, low dose gamma irradiation improved the AlGaN/GaN HEMT dc performance. The effect may be due to the strain relaxation effect and due to the donor type defects generated during the gamma irradiation.