Kopin makes major advances in gallium nitride HEMT materials technology

Kopin Corporation today announced that record results from gallium nitride (GaN)-based high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) materials have been published in the Applied Physics Letters of the American Institute of Physics. The advanced GaN-based materials developed at Kopin and described in this study are important for improving performance of next-generation power amplifiers and power switching converters. The article describes the use of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) as the conducting layer in HEMT structures grown on sapphire and silicon carbide substrates. The use of an InGaN channel layer (instead of GaN) has the benefit of providing a back-channel barrier for better electron confinement, which is important for deep sub-micron gate length devices to achieve ultra-high-frequency operation. Using proprietary metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) growth processes, Kopin scientists demonstrated a record high electron mobility of 1290 cm2/V·s and record low sheet resistance of 240 ohms/square (about 30 percent lower than the previous best published result) for device structures employing an InGaN channel.