Low-thermal-budget Au-free ohmic contact to an ultrathin barrier AlGaN/GaN heterostructure utilizing a micro-patterned ohmic recess

A pre-ohmic micro-patterned recess process,is utilized to fabricate Ti/Al/Ti/TiN ohmic contact to an ultrathin-barrier(UTB) AlGaN/GaN heterostructure,featuring a significantly reduced ohmic contact resistivity of 0.56 Ω.mm at an alloy temperat-ure of 550 ℃.The sheet resistances increase with the temperature following a power law with the index of +2.58,while the spe-cific contact resistivity decreases with the temperature.The contact mechanism can be well described by thermionic field emis-sion (TFE).The extracted Schottky barrier height and electron concentration are 0.31 eV and 5.52 × 1018 cm-3,which suggests an intimate contact between ohmic metal and the UTB-AlGaN as well as GaN buffer.A good correlation between ohmic trans-fer length and the micro-pattern size is revealed,though in-depth investigation is needed.A preliminary CMOS-process-compat-ible metal-insulator-semiconductor high-mobility transistor (MIS-HEMT) was fabricated with the proposed Au-free ohmic con-tact technique.