Case 13294/14135/14353

High-Performance Nitride Transistor

Keywords:

Solid state power electronics, nitride semiconductors, normally-off devices

Applications:

High voltage power electronics, power amplification, digital electronics, hybrid vehicles, high power transmission lines

Problem:

Current methods to fabricate normally-off devices are vulnerable to gate leakage and poor electron transport due to the ultra thin barrier requirement and/or the degraded performance due to fluorine atom contamination or RIE induced damage.

Technology:

These inventions relate to a new kind of normally-off nitride-based transistor GaN-spacer MOSFET which combines high conductivity in the access regions of the transistor with an enhancement-mode intrinsic transistor. The new normally-off dual-gate GaN transistors are based on the idea of combining a normally-off transistor with low breakdown voltage, with a high breakdown voltage normally-on GaN HEMTs. The GaN HEMT can be either AlGaN/GaN HEMT or AlInN/GaN HEMT, or any other nitride-based device. It should be noted that this invention can also be used for Si, diamond and SiC-based power transistors as it is independent of the specific semiconductor material used.

Advantages:
  • Tolerant to process variations
  • Excellent electron mobility at the interfaces
  • Ability to control the threshold voltage by thickness

Inventors:
  • Dr. Tomas Palacios (Department Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT)
  • Bin Lu (Department Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT)
  • Jinwook Chung (Department Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT)

Intellectual Property:
  • 13294: US Patent Application Number 12/574146, filed on October 6, 2010
  • 14135: US Patent Application Number 13/557414, filed on July 25, 2012
  • 14353: US Patent Application Number 13/167236, filed on June 23, 2011

Publications:

Lu, B., O. I. Saadat and T. Palacios, “High-Performance Integrated Dual-Gate AlGaN/GaN Enhancement-Mode Transistor,” IEEE Electron Dev. Letts., vol. 31, pp. 990-992 (2010).

Last revised: April 30, 2013

>>List of MIT Energy IP<<