Recent Advances in Ultrafast High-Electron-Mobility Transistor-Technology,

Abstract

Recent advances in material growth and fabrication process have made possible the realization of a new class of ultra-fast High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) in the AlInAs/GaInAs material system (lattice-matched to InP). In the last three (3) years alone, through improvements in materials and shrinking of gate length, the speed of state-of-the-art AlInAs/GaInAs HEMTs has been increased at an astounding rate: from 80 GHz in 1987 to 250 GHz as of today. Such a pace of progress, however, cannot be maintained indefinitely. As the gate length approaches the 0.1 PM regime, it becomes increasingly more difficult to improve the device speed by simply reducing the gate length. In this gate length regime, parasitic delays, such as drain delay (due to the extension of the drain depletion region) and capacitance charging time (gate pad and fringe), represent a large portion of the total delay and will ultimately limit the device extrinsic speed.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 22, 1992
Accession Number
ADP007652

Entities

People

  • Loi D. Nguyen

Organizations

  • HRL Laboratories

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Electron Mobility
  • Electronics
  • Electrons
  • High Electron Mobility Transistors
  • Materials
  • Mobility
  • Solid State Electronics
  • Transistors

Fields of Study

  • Materials science

Readers

  • Economics
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Semiconductor Device Technology

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics