Plasma MBE growth conditions of AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility transistors on silicon and their device characteristics with epitaxially regrown ohmic contacts

Silicon substrates offer an attractive substrate platform for GaN RF and power electronics. In this work, we address the key challenges and provide solutions for the RF-MBE growth of GaN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) on Si(111). Moreover, by developing low-leakage buffer layers and employing raised source/drain regrown ohmic contacts, high-performance HEMTs are realized at a significantly lower process temperature by plasma MBE than by MOCVD. This is expected to motivate further ideas for the integration of GaN with silicon that go beyond RF and power electronics into the regime of low-power digital logic by exploiting the unique polarization properties of GaN.