Tuesday 10 March 2015
When a transistor is made of gallium nitride semiconductor material, things are not what they seem. Marcin Hajlasz has been studying the unconventional behaviour of metal contacts to this semiconductor and reports his new findings at the IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Test Structures, 23-26 March in Phoenix, Arizona. He found that small changes to the fabrication process can have a huge effect on the resistance of the transistor, in particular under the contact itself. The standard methods for testing contact quality are shown to fail miserably in some cases, and an improved method has been developed to resolve this.
