(Keynote) Nitrogen-Ion Implantation Doping of Ga2O3 and Its Application to Transistors

As a key ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor, gallium oxide (Ga2O3) has been attracting much interest for power device applications due to its excellent material properties based on an extremely large bandgap of 4.5 eV and the availability of high-quality, large-diameter wafers produced from bulk single crystals synthesized by melt growth methods. Despite having received only little attention, the ease of both n- and p-type ion implantation doping is another very attractive and important feature for Ga2O3 device technologies. Recently, we succeeded in developing nitrogen (N)-ion implantation doping technology to form p-type Ga2O3 [1]. Note that it is almost impossible to obtain p-type Ga2O3 with effective hole conductivity as for conventional semiconductors. This is not only due to a lack of shallow acceptors with moderate activation energies but also because the valence band structure of Ga2O3, which is composed of O 2p orbitals, is characterized by a very large hole effective mass and conduces to self-trapping of holes with associated characteristic lattice distortions. Therefore, p-Ga2O3 is only useful for engineering large energy barriers in the form of p-n junctions. We have experimentally confirmed that a N-ion implanted p-Ga2O3 region formed in n-Ga2O3 can be utilized as a current blocking layer. In this talk, we first discuss the material properties of p-Ga2O3 formed by N-ion implantation doping. Then, the device process and characteristics of vertical normally-on Ga2O3 MOSFETs fabricated by using multiple Si- and N-ion implantations are presented [2]. This work was partially supported by Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (CSTI), Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP), “Next-generation power electronics” (funding agency: New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization). [1] M. H. Wong, C.-H. Lin, A. Kuramata, S. Yamakoshi, H. Murakami, Y. Kumagai, and M. Higashiwaki, Appl. Phys. Lett. 113, 102103 (2018). [2] M. H. Wong, K. Goto, H. Murakami, Y. Kumagai, and M. Higashiwaki, IEEE Electron Device Lett. 40, 431 (2019).