Band alignments and improved leakage properties of (La2O3)0.5(SiO2)0.5/SiO2/GaN stacks for high-temperature metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor applications

The band alignments of (La2O3)(0.5)(SiO2)(0.5)(LSO)/GaN and LSO/SiO2/GaN gate dielectric stacks were investigated comparatively by using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The valence band offsets for LSO/GaN stack and LSO/SiO2/GaN stack are 0.88 and 1.69 eV, respectively, while the corresponding conduction band offsets are found to be 1.40 and 1.83 eV, respectively. Measurements of the leakage current density as function of temperature revealed that the LSO/SiO2/GaN stack has much lower leakage current density than that of the LSO/GaN stack, especially at high temperature. It is concluded that the presence of a SiO2 buffer layer increases band offsets and reduces the leakage current density effectively.