A comparison of the 60Co gamma radiation hardness, breakdown characteristics and the effect of SiNx capping on InAlN and AlGaN HEMTs for space applications

Electrical performance and stability of InAlN and AlGaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) subjected 9.1 mrad of Co-60 gamma radiation and off-state voltage step-stressing until breakdown are reported. Comparison with commercially available production-level AlGaN HEMT devices, which showed negligible drift in DC performance throughout all experiments, suggests degradation mechanisms must be managed and suppressed through development of advanced epitaxial and surface passivation techniques in order to fully exploit the robustness of the III-nitride material system. Of the research level devices without dielectric layer surface capping, InAlN HEMTs exhibited the greater stability compared with AlGaN under off-state bias stressing and gamma irradiation in terms of their DC characteristics, although AlGaN HEMTs had significantly higher breakdown voltages. The effect of plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition SiNx surface capping is explored, highlighting the sensitivity of InAlN HEMT performance to surface passivation techniques. InAlN-SiNx HEMTs suffered more from trap related degradation than AlGaN-SiNx devices in terms of radiation hardness and step-stress characteristics, attributed to an increased capturing of carriers in traps at the InAlN/SiNx interface.