A novel GaN MIS‐HEMT with a floating clamp electrode for suppressing short‐channel effect

Abstract

In this work, a novel GaN MIS-HEMT (metal-insulator-semiconductor high electron mobility transistors) featuring a floating clamp (FC) electrode is proposed for suppressing the short-channel effect. By inserting the FC electrode near to the drain-side gate edge, the transverse potential at the gate edge can be clamped to less than 2 V, thereby the short-channel effect can be suppressed. Compared to the conventional short-channel GaN MIS-HEMT, the proposed device exhibits much decreased off-state electron density at the drain voltage of 10 V, which leads to the off-state leakage current decreasing from 10–1 to 10–7 A/mm, without an obvious sacrifice of the on-state current. Meanwhile, the proposed GaN MIS-HEMT also delivers a much lower reverse gate-to-drain capacitor. The excellent characteristics of the proposed GaN MIS-HEMT show that the device is promising for the future power applications.