Enhancement of electron transport mobility in GaAs/InGaAs asymmetrically doped narrow quantum well pHEMT structure

Abstract We study the effect of asymmetric doping concentrations on the electron mobility μ in GaAs/InGaAs-based single quantum well (SQW) as well as double quantum well (DQW) pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) structures. Unequal doping in the substrate and surface barriers ( n d1 and n d2 ) causes asymmetric distributions of subband wave functions, ψ 0 and ψ 1 , which influence the subband scattering rate matrix elements (SSRME), thereby affecting the subband mobility μ n . For narrow well widths ( w w ), in SQW structures, mostly a single subband is occupied. We show that an increase in n d2 , keeping n d1 fixed, enhances μ nonlinearly. The interface roughness (ir-) scattering mostly dominates μ in thin wells ( w w < 70 Å), while generally, μ is determined by ionized impurity (ii-) scattering and to some extent by alloy disorder (ad-) scattering. The influence of ir-scattering enhances, while ad-scattering diminishes, by reducing n d2 . For DQW, a double subband is occupied. In a symmetric DQW structure at resonance, n d1 = n d2 , ψ 0 and ψ 1 equally extend into both the wells. For a minor variation, say n d1 > n d2 , ψ 0 mostly lies in one well while ψ 1 is in the other well. In the case of n d1 < n d2 , the distribution reverts. The substantial changes in ψ 0 and ψ 1 influence the intra- and inter-SSRME differently through intersubband effects, leading to nonlinear μ n as a function of n d2 . Taking n d1 + n d2 = 3 × 10 18 cm −3 , we show that for w w1 = w w2 = 80 Å, a shallow dip in μ occurs at n d1 = n d2 = 1.5 × 10 18 cm −3 . Whereas, for w w1 = 60 Å and w w2 = 100 Å, the dip in μ occurs near the corresponding resonance, n d1 = 2.3 × 10 18 cm −3 and n d2 = 0.7 × 10 18 cm −3 . Our results of nonlinear μ can be utilized for performance analysis of pHEMT.