(Invited) Selective Area Doping in Gallium Nitride: A Retrospective of the ARPA-E PNDIODES Program

Abstract

As silicon-based semiconductors are fast approaching their performance limits for high power requirements, wide-bandgap semiconductors such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) with their superior electrical properties are likely candidates to replace them. The DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) launched the Power Nitride Doping Innovation Offers Devices Enabling SWITCHES (PNDIODES) program in 2017 to address the lack of a viable selective area doping processes in GaN which is a major barrier to fabricating vertical GaN power electronic devices. The PNDIODES program focused on the mechanistic understanding and development of transformational selective area doping processes to demonstrate arbitrarily placed, contactable, and generally useable p-n junction regions in GaN. A retrospective of the PNDIODES program is provided discussing the origins of the program, the progress and challenges of the developed selective area doping processes, and a description of the advanced characterization techniques developed to investigate the selectively doped regions.