Record Maximum Transconductance of 3.45 mS/ for III-V FETs

This letter presents a self-aligned InGaAs quantum-well MOSFET with a transconductance, gm,max, of 3.45 mS/μm at Vds= 0.5 V. This is a record value among III-V FETs of any kind, including MOSFETs and HEMTs, and represents an improvement of over 10% with respect to the previous record on planar devices. This result was achieved by redesigning the access regions that link the intrinsic device to the source and drain contacts so as to increase their electron concentration. This mitigates the nonlinear increase of the access resistance at high current. This is often referred to as source starvation and leads to the loss of transconductance under strong ON conditions.