Low leakage current and high breakdown voltage of AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diodes with wet-etching groove anode

AlGaN/GaN heterojunction epitaxies with wide bandgap, high critical electric field as well as high density and high mobility two-dimensional electron gas have shown great potential applications in the next-generation high-power and high-frequency devices. Especially, with the development of Si-based GaN epitaxial technique with big size, GaN devices with low cost also show great advantage in consumer electronics. In order to improve the rectification efficiency of AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diode (SBD), low leakage current and low turn-on voltage are important. The GaN Schottky barrier diode with low work-function metal as anode is found to be very effective to reduce turn-on voltage. However, the low Schottky barrier height makes the Schottky interface sensitive to damage to groove surface, which leads to a high leakage current. In this work, a novel wet-etching technique with thermal oxygen oxidation and KOH corrosion is used to prepare the anode groove, and the surface roughness of groove decreases from 0.57 to 0.23 nm, compared with that of the dry-etching surface of groove. Meanwhile, the leakage current is suppressed from 1.5 × 10^–6 to 2.6 × 10^–7 A/mm. Benefiting from the great corrosion selectively of hot KOH solution to AlGaN barrier layer and GaN channel layer after thermal oxygen oxidation, the spikes of the edge of groove region caused by the nonuniform distribution of plasma in the cavity is improved, and the breakdown voltage of the fabricated AlGaN/GaN SBDs is raised from –1.28 to –1.73 kV.