Power Electronics ♦ news digest
The annual award recognises EpiGaN to have fostered positive momentum in revenue and employee growth in a three year time span.
“EpiGaN has experienced positive revenue and cash flow since its inception in 2010,” says Marianne Germain, co-founder and CEO of EpiGaN.
She continues, “We are honoured by this award to be recognised by Trends Magazine for our stellar growth over the past few years. It is the dedication of our team that has enabled us to maintain consistent growth by shipping products to customers worldwide from our facility in Hasselt.”
The company now has ten employees and is planning to grow the organisation further in 2014 to support its manufacturing expansion.
EpiGaN has a strong technical foundation with leading- edge semiconductor material products. Its GaN - on -silicon wafers are being used to create high voltage power and high frequency RF devices that in turn are being used to save energy in consumer electronics, industrial power supplies, AC drives, cellular base stations, cable TV infrastructure and other things.
The company has its cleanroom manufacturing facilities locally in Hasselt, Belgium located in the triangle Aachen, Eindhoven and Leuven . EpiGaN is one of the few Flemish companies that does not outsource manufacturing of high tech products, making it a valuable contributor to the local economy.
High pressure laser doping of GaN
To improve gallium nitride device performance for high- frequency RF applications, AppliCote is developing a high pressure laser doping process
Contact resistance and access resistance in deeply scaled FET devices greatly impact device performance at high frequency. This is of particular importance for GaN- based devices, which can achieve high power at high frequencies (>100 GHz).
Several processes have been developed to address these resistance issues, but these processes all have drawbacks.
For example, ion implantation can be used to increase the concentration of electrically active impurities in the source and drain regions of the device, but this process requires high temperatures for electrical activation, along
with capping layers to prevent GaN decomposition.
In addition, implantation creates lattice damage that is difficult to remove via annealing and acts to compensate the dopants.
To improve GaN device performance for high-frequency RF applications, AppliCote is developing a high pressure (greater than 500 psi gas/vapour precursor) laser doping process.
The procedure will introduce electrically active n-type impurities into the source and drain regions of a GaN device to reduce contact resistance and decrease access resistance from the metal contact to the two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the device.
Low pressure (less than 60 psi gas/vapor precursor) laser doping process that has been successfully used and reported previously with numerous materials, including GaN, SiC, silicon/SiGe, and silicon-based photovoltaics.
Processing parameters for high pressure doping of silicon carbide have been developed (patent pending). Applicote plans to optimise processing conditions for doping GaN with silicon using a gaseous precursor and answer key questions about the electrical properties of the laser-doped GaN as well as process control and capabilities.
The high pressure laser doping process is a combination of a thermally driven process resulting from the interaction of the semiconductor with a high-power, short- duration laser pulse and a pressure driven process to increase dopant concentration to maximum solubility levels at deep depths while mitigating surface damage.
The laser pulse results in an ultra-fast thermal ramp (1010 K/s) and impurity incorporation through decomposition of chemisorbed gas-phase source species and thermal diffusion of atoms into the crystalline lattice.
Impurity incorporation rate, diffusivity, and activation are all functions of the laser wavelength, power, and pulse time and precursor pressure.
Applicote has built a laser system and processing chamber for high pressure laser doping for rapid processing of substrates and simplification of the device fabrication process.
The technology will also be expanded to carbon doping of silicon wafers to create a surface region of SiC in silicon to accommodate GaN thin film deposition.
March 2014
www.compoundsemiconductor.net 139
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