Analysis of reverse leakage current in differently passivated AlGaN/GaN HEMTs: A case study

The role of SiN
_x
passivation using two different deposition techniques, namely Inductively Coupled Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition (ICPCVD) and Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) on gate reverse leakage current of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs was studied. It was observed that devices having PECVD SiN
_x
films exhibit higher leakage than devices with ICPCVD SiN
_x
films. To understand the mechanism behind this behavior, the role of Poole-Frenkel emission on gate reverse leakage current for both the types of passivation schemes was investigated.