Impact of oxide/barrier charge on threshold voltage instabilities in AlGaN/GaN metal-oxide-semiconductor heterostructures

Abstract

Threshold voltage instabilities in AlGaN/GaN metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) heterostructures were investigated by means of capacitance-voltage (CV) hysteresis measurement and simulations. We focused on the impact of net charge at oxide/semiconductor interface (Qint) on the CV hysteresis. Our simulations suggest that due to different band bending at the interface, any positive or negative Qint with lower density (in the order of 1012 cm−2) results in a presence of relatively shallow unoccupied oxide/barrier interface states in equilibrium. On the other hand, high density of negative Qint (Qint/q ≈ −1013 cm−2) results in very deep unoccupied interface states, which in turn leads to incomplete electron re-emission during backward CV sweep and thus increased CV hysteresis of the MOS heterostructures compared to previous case. Impact of Qint is illustrated experimentally on MOS heterostructures with Al2O3 gate dielectric grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, showing Qint of −1.2 × 1013 and +0.5 × 1012 cm−2 for structures with and without post-deposition annealing, respectively. Our results therefore suggest that normally-off AlGaN/GaN MOS heterostructure field-effect transistors featuring high density of negative Qint can be expected to be more susceptible for threshold voltage instabilities compared to normally-on counterparts.