Study of gate oxide traps in HfO2/AlGaN/GaN metal-oxide-semiconductor high-electron-mobility transistors by use of ac transconductance method

We introduce an ac-transconductance method to profile the gate oxide traps in a HfO2 gated AlGaN/GaN Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor High-Electron-Mobility Transistors (MOS-HEMTs) that can exchange carriers with metal gates, which in turn causes changes in analog and pulsed channel currents. The method extracts energy and spacial distributions of the oxide and interface traps under the gate from the frequency dependence of ac transconductance. We demonstrate the method using MOS-HEMTs with gate oxides that were annealed at different temperatures. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4795717]