【Device Papers】Investigation of Back-Barrier Engineered III-Nitride HEMT on β-Ga₂O₃ for High-Power Electronic

      Researchers from the B V Raju Institute of Technology have published a dissertation titled "Investigation of Back-Barrier Engineered III-Nitride HEMT on β-Ga₂O₃ for High-Power Electronic" in 2026 International Conference on Next Generation Electronics (NELEX).

Abstract

      In this work modelling and simulation for a High electron mobility transistor (HEMT) using an Al_0.1Ga_0.9N back-barrier on a Beta Gallium Oxide (β-Ga₂O₃) substrate for improving the carrier confinement and reducing leakage current for conventional AlGaN/GaN devices is presented. The proposed III-Nitride/β-Ga₂O₃ heterostructure has been studied by performing the simulations using Silvaco. Compared to the theoretical model simulations, several physical models, such as polarization effects, field dependency of the mobility and recombination mechanism have been considered. The presence of AlGaN barrier results in electron gas of high density with 2 dimention (2DEG) at AlGaN/GaN interface while the back barrier created by the introduced Al_0.1Ga_0.9N further generates a conduction band offset, which is used to effectively suppress the electron spillover towards the substrate. Furthermore, ultra-wide bandgap substrate provides better electric-field processing capability, which helps to improve breakdown capability. As shown in simulation results, the proposed device has considerably lower leakage current and better breakdown voltage than the conventional structure without a back-barrier. Although a slight decrease in drain current due to stronger carrier confinement is observed, the overall device performance such as leakage suppression as well as electric-field distribution and reliability is substantially improved. These results indicate that the proposed structure is a good candidate for next generation high-power and high RF electronics applications.

DOI：

https://doi.org/10.1109/NELeX69209.2026.11590670