Thermal characterisation of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs grown on silicon and sapphire substrates based on pulsed I-V measurements

The high power RF device performance decreases as operation temperature increases (e.g. fall of electron mobility impacting the cut-off frequencies and degradation of device reliability). Therefore the determination of device temperature is a key issue for device topology optimisation. This work presents the comparison between pulsed I-V at different temperature and DC measurements of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs grown on two different substrates: sapphire and silicon. This technique allows the determination of mean channel temperature and the device thermal resistance. The thermal resistance is a classical way to define the average channel temperature as a function of the dissipated power. In this work the thermal resistance ratio of the HEMT grown on sapphire compared to the one grown on silicon is found to be 1.7 instead of 3 as expected from straightforward thermal conductivity ratio. This lower difference is clearly attributed to the contribution of the GaN buffer layer.