CEA-Leti Papers at IEDM 2020 Highlight Progress in Overcoming Challenges

Gallium Nitride Seen as Highly Efficient Replacement for Silicon in Wide Range of Consumer and Industrial Uses - GRENOBLE , France - Dec. Two complementary research papers from CEA-Leti confirmed that the institute's approach to gallium-nitride (GaN) technologies is on track overcome challenges in the architecture and performance of advanced GaN devices embedding a MOS gate, and targeting the fast-growing global market for power-conversion systems. In papers presented at IEDM 2020, scientists recounted experiments with variations of high-electronmobility transistors (HEMT) based on gallium nitride-on-silicon (GaN-on-Si), called GaN-on-Si HEMT. GaN-based semiconductors improve both performance and reliability of increasingly compact power converters compared to silicon, and AIGaN/GaN HEMTs have shown potential to replace power-conversion solutions based on Si or SiC for high-frequency applications with high power and low noise. This technology is therefore expected to be a cost-effective, power-conversion solution for many end-user applications, ranging from smartphones to kitchen appliances and e-vehicles and from battery loaders to DC/DC or AC/DC converters. Considered together, the two papers provide a novel understanding of the gate stack of the GaN MOS-c HEMT developed at CEA-Leti in the IRT Nanoelec framework. They demonstrate the complexity of GaN MOS stack characterization as well as the requirement for deep expertise to report and analyze reliable parameter values.