Radiation effects on GaN HEMTs

Emerging WBG semiconductors hold the potential to revolutionize the electronics world nowadays. The most mature and developed WBG materials to date are silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), which possess bandgaps of 3.3 eV and 3.4 eV respectively, whereas silicon(Si) has a bandgap of 1.1 eV. The WBG materials enable high breakdown voltage, high thermal conductivity, and radiation resistance ability, which is superior to Si for many applications, such as 5G/6G network, autonomous vehicles, power converters in energy and power systems, as well biochemical sensors in special scenarios.

A constant demand exists to improve these types of devices for system stability and reliability, for both defense and security, and for industrial applications. RISE has continuously worked on the improvement of the WGB-based electronic/photonic devices to enable them to operate in harsh environments: extremely high or low temperature variations, strong laser illumination, as well as x-ray and proton radiation conditions. The goal of this grant is to support the collaboration between RISE and U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) to perform radiation testing on WBG semiconductor-based devices by investigating the single event effects in these devices, for instance GaN-based HEMTs (High Electron Mobility Transistors), as illustrated in the image above.