Gate and drain low frequency noise of ALGAN/GAN HEMTs featuring high and low gate leakage currents

The qualification of a technology needs rigorous and numerous stress experiments to attest of a high level of reliability. Low frequency noise measurements are known as an effective characterization method for the evaluation of device reliability. This technique is usually applied on the drain current spectral density, but it is now largely accepted that the gate access is a major reliability indicator. Moreover, devices featuring slight differences in their drain current noise can be subjected to strong differences on their gate leakage currents, and as a consequence on the current low frequency noise (LFN). In the present work, LFN measurements are investigated on the gate and drain currents of two sets of AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) with high and low gate leakage currents. It is demonstrated that devices featuring weak differences on their drain current can be subjected to strong differences on their gate leakage signatures: moreover, it is found that the high leakage current can generate numerous traps under the gated zone of the transistor, leading to a change of the intrinsic tuning voltage and by consequence of the number of carriers, thus explaining the reduction on the drain current. The transistors show a difference of 3 to 4 decades on their gate current noise and a negligible shift of 20% on their drain current noise. The large variations on the gate LFN signatures between the two sets of devices, and the induced charges for the leaky devices can probably be related with large differences on the expected lifetimes for the devices under test.