Over 1200 V Normally-OFF p-NiO Gated AlGaN/GaN HEMTs on Si With a Small Threshold Voltage Shift

In this letter, we demonstrated a normally-off AlGaN/GaN HEMT using p-NiO as a gate stack combined with a recess structure. The fabricated HEMT exhibits a positive threshold voltage of 1.73 V, a saturation output current of 524 mA/mm, a small subthreshold swing of 79.7 mV/dec and a maximum transconductance as high as 143 mS/mm. This is the first time to demonstrate the breakdown characteristics of a p-NiO gate HEMT with a high breakdown voltage of 1205 V and a low specific ON-resistance of 2.22 $\text{m}\Omega \cdot $ cm², yielding a competitive Baliga’s figure-of-merit of 0.65 GW/cm². The instability evaluation of ${V}_{\text {TH}}$ by step stress and pulse transfer curves shows that the p-NiO gate HEMT has a negligible ${V}_{\text {TH}}$ shift in the entire measured gate bias range, which can be attributed to the counteraction between the electron trapping-induced positive $\text{V}_{\text {TH}}$ shift and hole accumulation induced-negative ${V}_{\text {TH}}$ shift. It is well understood in terms of the carrier transport model based on the large band discontinuity at the interface of the p-NiO/AlGaN type-II heterojunction, which is further verified by transient gate current spectra.