Ti/Au/Al/Ni/Au Low Contact Resistance and Sharp Edge Acuity for Highly Scalable AlGaN/GaN HEMTs

In this letter, we have reported a novel metal scheme Ti/Au/Al/Ni/Au for ohmic contact on AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility transistors. The reported metal scheme is observed to show minimum metal out-diffusion and sharp edge acuity at high-temperature annealing, which facilitates aggressive scaling of source–drain separation ( ${L} _{\textsf {SD}}$ ). We have demonstrated ${L} _{\textsf {SD}}$ as low as 300 nm with gate length ( ${L} _{\textsf {g}}$ ) of 100 nm for this metal stack. We observed improvement in ON-resistance ( ${R} _{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle ON}}$ ) from 3 to $1.25~\Omega \cdot$ mm, transconductance ( ${g} _{\textsf {m}}$ ) from 276 to 365 mS/mm, saturation drain current ( ${I} _{\textsf {DS,sat}}$ ) from 906 to 1230 mA/mm, and unity current gain frequency ( ${f} _{\textsf {T}}$ ) from 70 to 93 GHz by scaling ${L} _{\textsf {SD}}$ from $3~\mu \text{m}$ to 300 nm. The gate lengths for all devices were 100 nm.