Temperature-Sensitivity of Two Microwave HEMT Devices: AlGaAs/GaAs vs. AlGaN/GaN Heterostructures

The goal of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of the thermal impact on the microwave performance of high electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) based on GaAs and GaN technologies. To accomplish this challenging goal, the relative sensitivity of the microwave performance to changes in the ambient temperature is determined by using scattering parameter measurements and the corresponding equivalent-circuit models. The studied devices are two HEMTs with the same gate width of 200 µm but fabricated using different semiconductor materials: GaAs and GaN technologies. The investigation is performed under both cooled and heated conditions, by varying the temperature from −40 °C to 150 °C. Although the impact of the temperature strongly depends on the selected operating condition, the bias point is chosen in order to enable, as much as possible, a fair comparison between the two different technologies. As will be shown, quite similar trends are observed for the two different technologies, but the impact of the temperature is more pronounced in the GaN device.