Microelectronic Engineering 147 (2015) 134–136

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Microelectronic Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mee

1/f Noise Characteristics of AlGaN/GaN FinFETs with and without TMAH

surface treatment
V. Sindhuri a, Dong-Hyeok Son a, Dong-Gi Lee a, SungHwan Sakong c, Yoon-Ha Jeong c, In-Tak Cho d,
Jong-Ho Lee d, Yong-Tae Kim e, Sorin Cristoloveanu f, Youngho Bae g, Ki-Sik Im a,b,⇑, Jung-Hee Lee a,⇑
a
School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea
b
Institute of Semiconductor Fusion Technology, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea
c
Division of IT-Conversions Engineering and the Department of Electrical Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang 790-784, Republic of Korea
d
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-742, Republic of Korea
e
Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, Republic of Korea
f
Institute of Microelectronics, Electromagnetism and Photonics, Grenoble Polytechnic Institute, Grenoble 38016, France
g
Department of Electronics Engineering, Uiduk University, Gyeongju 780-713, Republic of Korea

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper, we have fabricated and investigated the AlGaN/GaN fin-shaped field-effect transistors
Received 18 February 2015 (FinFETs) with and without TMAH surface treatment. DC and noise characteristics of the FinFETs were
Received in revised form 31 March 2015 compared to evaluate the interface quality between Al2O3 layer and the side-wall GaN surface. The
Accepted 5 April 2015
tetramethyl ammonium hydroxide (TMAH)-treated device with a fin width of 70 nm and gate length,
Available online 9 April 2015
Lg = 5 lm exhibited excellent device performances, such as drain current of 0.16 mA and transconduc-
tance (gm) of 0.11 ms, both 30% improved, and extremely small gate leakage current of about 10 9 A at
Keywords:
Vgs = 5 V which is approximately two orders lower in magnitude compared to that of the device without
AlGaN/GaN
2DEG
TMAH treatment. Improved low-frequency noise performances were obtained for TMAH treated device
FinFET due to the enhanced side-wall quality after the TMAH surface treatment. The trap density was found
TMAH treatment to be reduced approximately one order after TMAH treatment. Thus, simple surface treatment not only
1/f noise characteristics smoothens the sidewall surface but also eliminates the plasma damage caused during the fin etching,
which leads to the reduction of trap density in AlGaN/GaN FinFETs.
Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction [2,4–5]. However, the surface of AlGaN/GaN FinFETs suffers from

Gallium nitride (GaN) is a promising material for high voltage
and high frequency operation due to its excellent material proper-
ties, such as large bandgap, high critical electric field, and high sat-
uration electron velocity [1]. Nanochannel fin-shaped field-effect
transistors (FinFETs) with AlGaN/GaN heterojunction have been
fabricated [2–4], offering improved short-channel effects, high
on-current, low leakage, and excellent subthreshold behavior.
AlGaN/GaN FinFETs with two different channels, (i) 2-DEG channel
at AlGaN/GaN heterointerface on the top of the fin and (ii) two
side-wall GaN MOSFET channels is very attractive for high power
switching applications due to the enhanced gate controllability,
which results in remarkable on-state and off-state performances
⇑ Corresponding authors at: School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook
National University, Daegu 702-701, Republic of Korea (K.-S. Im, J.-H. Lee). Tel.:
+82 53 940 8655.
E-mail addresses: ksim@ee.knu.ac.kr (K.-S. Im), jlee@ee.knu.ac.kr (J.-H. Lee).
plasma damage due to the exposure to high energetic plasma dur-
ing fin etching. The surface damage/roughness induced during the
plasma etching increases trap density [6] which leads to a parasitic
leakage path [7]. This degrades the device performance by increas-
ing the gate leakage current. Therefore, a surface treatment after
the dry etching process is inevitable. In particular, the tetramethyl
ammonium hydroxide (TMAH) solution with its anisotropic etch-
ing property for GaN preferentially etches the side slopes to
remove the sharp etches protrusions on the side-wall caused dur-
ing plasma etching, which renders the surface smooth [8].
In this work, we have employed TMAH surface treatment for
AlGaN/GaN FinFETs for the purpose of reducing the plasma damage
and improving the interface quality between the atomic-layer-de-
posited (ALD) Al2O3 gate dielectric and the side-wall GaN surface.
We have compared the low-frequency noise (1/f) and DC perfor-
mances for devices with and without TMAH surface treatment.
The 1/f noise measurements indicate that the TMAH-treatment of
the etched sidewall surface effectively decreases the trap density

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mee.2015.04.023
0167-9317/Ó 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 V. Sindhuri et al. / Microelectronic Engineering 147 (2015) 134–136 135

DC performances such as drain current of 0.16 mA and transcon-

ductance (gm) of 0.11 ms which are 30% higher than for the device
without TMAH treatment. This is attributed to the improved
mobility in the side-wall MOS channel enabled by the smooth
surface achieved with TMAH treatment [8]. Extremely small gate
leakage current of about 10 9 A was obtained at Vgs = 5 V, which
is two orders lower compared to that of the device without TMAH
treatment. This is due to the improved interface quality between
Al2O3 layer and the side-wall GaN surface after TMAH treatment.
On the other hand, the high gate leakage current (10 7 A)
measured in the device without TMAH surface treatment is related
to the electron trapping into Al2O3 gate oxide from the GaN surface
which is due to the Poole–Frenkel emission [9]. Gate leakage
characteristics of the two different fabricated devices are shown
Fig. 1. Cross-sectional schematic of AlGaN/GaN FinFET with TMAH treatment
in Fig. 2(b). In order to investigate in detail electron trapping
(Wfin = 70 nm, Hfin = 200 nm, and 36 parallel fins). 2-DEG channel at AlGaN/GaN
heterojunction in the upper section of the fin (dots) and two sidewall MOS effects, we have performed 1/f noise measurements.
channels. The frequency-dependent drain-current noise spectral density
(SId) for both devices measured at Vds = 0.1 V and Vgs Vth = 0.6 V
in Al2O3/AlGaN/GaN FinFETs and improves DC performance, in par- is shown in Fig. 3. The TMAH-treated device exhibits lower noise
ticular on-state current and gate leakage current. magnitude (1.8  1017 at f = 10 Hz) when compared to the noise
(4.9  1017) measured in the device without TMAH treatment.
2. Growth and device fabrication The normalized drain-current noise spectral density (SId/I2d) is
plotted as a function of gate over drive voltage (Vgs Vth) to
The epitaxial layer of AlGaN/GaN heterostructure was grown by evaluate the dominant mechanism involved in the obtained noise
metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) on sapphire as shown in Fig. 4. Here, SId/I2d a (1/N) a 1/(Vgs Vth), where N is
substrate. It consists of low-temperature-grown initial GaN buffer the number of electrons in the channel. For TMAH-treated device
layer, 2 lm-thick highly resistive GaN layer, 80 nm-thick GaN
channel layer, and 30 nm-thick Al0.3Ga0.7N barrier layer. Firstly,
SiO2 mask is patterned by e-beam lithography on the active region
of the devices. The fin was defined by transformer-coupled plasma-
reactive ion etching (TCP-RIE) using a BCl3/Cl2 gas mixture. Then,
TMAH surface treatment (5% of solution at 90 °C) was directly
applied for 30 min. to smoothen the side-wall surfaces and to elim-
inate the plasma damage caused by dry etching process. A 20 nm-
thick Al2O3 gate dielectric was then deposited using ALD. The
source and drain contacts were formed by depositing Si/Ti/Al/Ni/
Au metals and followed by two-step rapid thermal process (RTP)
at 500 °C (20 s) and 800 °C (30 s) in N2 ambient. Finally, Ni/Au
was deposited as gate electrode. For comparison, AlGaN/GaN
FinFET without TMAH surface treatment was also fabricated. The
schematic of the proposed device is shown in Fig. 1.

3. Results and discussion

The transfer characteristics of the Al2O3/AlGaN/GaN FinFETs

(Wfin of 70 nm and Lg of 5 lm) with and without TMAH treatment Fig. 3. Drain current spectral density (SId) of device with and without TMAH surface
are shown in Fig. 2(a). The TMAH treated devices exhibit excellent treatment as a function of frequency.

Fig. 2. (a) ID–VG and (b) gate leakage characteristics of devices with and without TMAH surface treatment.
136 V. Sindhuri et al. / Microelectronic Engineering 147 (2015) 134–136
Fig. 4. Normalized drain-current spectral density as a function of gate overdrive
voltage.
Fig. 5. (SId/I2d) vs. Id at f = 10 Hz. The data are compared with the corresponding
plots of (gm/Id)2 vs. Id (solid line). (a) With TMAH treatment, (b) without TMAH
treatment.
SId/I2d varies as (Vgs Vth) 1.2, which highlights that noise is due to
mobility fluctuations. On the other hand, SId/I2d a (Vgs Vth) 1.7 in
the device without TMAH treatment, which is attributed to the
carrier trapping/de-trapping at the interface and hence, this noise
is due to correlated number-mobility fluctuations [10,11]. The
Hooge parameter (aH) is also calculated by aH = fWLCox(Vgs
Vth)SId/qI2d [12]; a value of 10 1–10 3 was obtained for both
devices. We believe that the reason for the high Hooge value is
due to the high-k dielectric (Al2O3) and the complicated epitaxial
structures [12].
Fig. 5(a) and (b) show the average normalized drain-current
noise spectral density (SId/I2d) at f = 10 Hz as a function of Id at
Vds = 0.1 V for both devices. The SId/I2d and (gm/Id)2 curves were
compared for both types of devices. A good correlation between
the two curves at high drain currents. It is noticed, however, that
at lower drain current in TMAH treated device SId/I2d is shifted
below the (gm/Id)2 (Fig. 5(a)). This indicates that the role of mobility
fluctuations is dominant in the TMAH treated device, rather than
the carrier number fluctuations caused by electron trapping/de-
trapping at the GaN MOS channel interface [13]; (i) (gm/Id)2 varies
in accordance to SId/I2d and (ii) SId/I2d is roughly proportional to 1/I2d.
Trap density was extracted from SVFB = q2kTkNt/fcWLC2ox [13] where
q is the electron charge, kT is the thermal energy, k is the tunneling
attenuation length, and Cox is the gate dielectric capacitance per unit
area. Low trap density 1.04  1019 eV 1 cm 3 was obtained for the
TMAH treated device. A density Nt of 1.12  1020 eV 1 cm 3 was
extracted in the device without TMAH treatment which is approxi-
mately one order higher. These results confirm that TMAH treatment
is effective in enhancing the performances of AlGaN/GaN FinFETs by
improving the interface quality between the Al2O3 dielectric and the
side-wall GaN surface.
4. Conclusions
The TMAH-treated FinFET exhibited better noise and DC perfor-
mances compared to the device without TMAH treatment. These
improvements are significant and originate from the efficiency of
TMAH treatment to reduce the side-wall defects and surface
roughness caused by the plasma etching. It was observed that
the noise generated in TMAH treated device is governed by the car-
rier mobility fluctuations in the channel, whereas the device with-
out TMAH surface treatment suffers from the correlated number-
mobility fluctuations due to trapping/de-trapping phenomena on
the near-interface traps.
Acknowledgments
This work was partly supported by the BK21 Plus funded by the
Ministry of Education (21A20131600011), the IT R&D program of
MOTIE/KEIT (10048931), and the National Research Foundation
of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP)
(Nos. 2008-0062617, 2011-0016222, 2013R1A6A3A04057719).
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