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Effect of ultrathin AlN spacer on electronic properties of GaN/SiC heterojunction bipolar transistors

GaN/SiC heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) with an ultrathin AlN spacer layer at the n-GaN/p-SiC emitter junction are proposed for the control of the electronic properties of GaN/SiC heterojunctions. The insertion of an AlN spacer is found to be promising in terms of improving electron injection efficiency owing to the reduced potential barrier (0.54 eV) to electron injection and reduced recombination via interface traps. We also investigated the effect of pre-irradiation of active nitrogen atoms (N*) prior to AlN growth for the control of the electronic properties of GaN/AlN/SiC heterojunctions. We found that the potential barrier was further reduced to 0.46 eV by N* pre-irradiation. The HBT structure was successfully fabricated using our newly developed process featuring ion implantation and Pd ohmic contacts to obtain a low contact resistivity to a p-SiC base at a temperature as low as 600 °C. A fabricated HBT without an AlN layer showed a low current gain (α ∼ 0.001), whereas the GaN/AlN/SiC HBT showed improved current gains of 0.1 in the case of using a 1-nm-thick AlN spacer without N* pre-irradiation and 0.2 in the case of using a 2-nm-thick AlN spacer with N* pre-irradiation.