Thermal Study of the High-Frequency Noise in GaN HEMTs

The high-frequency noise performance of the GaN HEMT is studied for temperatures between 297-398 K. The access resistances R_S and R_D have a limiting effect on the noise performance, and in this paper, their temperature dependence is studied in detail for a 2 times 100 mum GaN HEMT. R_S and R_D show an increase of 0.71 and 0.86 %/K, respectively. The self-heating effect due to dissipated power is also studied to allow accurate intrinsic small-signal and noise parameter extraction. The thermal resistance is measured by infrared microscopy. Based on these results, a temperature dependent noise model including self-heating and temperature-dependent access resistances is derived and verified with measurements.