Performance and reliability of microelectronic devices are governed by the mechanical strain. Typically, strain engineering implies uniformly distributed strain. However, we offer a different perspective by hypothesizing that very small but localized strain (or stress) may have significant impact on the overall behavior of AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs). Micro to nanoscale confined mechanical stress fields may develop unavoidably and are ignored because their spatial average is insignificant. We exploit high resolution techniques such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and micro-Raman spectroscopy to spatially resolve the stress field in GaN HEMTs to demonstrate the stress localization and then radiation effects.

To study stress localization effects on the global electrical characteristics, we introduced a highly localized strain relief by milling a 20×30 μm² micro trench about 70 μm deep on the backside of an 800×840 μm² size HEMT die. The resulting local relaxation of in-plane residual strain was mapped using micro-Raman technique. Our results show that a decrease of only 0.02% strain can decrease the overall output saturation current up to ~20 %. The drop of output current is attributed to reduced two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) sheet carrier density and electron mobility due to the strain relief in the device layers. However, the mechanistic process of strain relief also causes defect generation at the interfaces, which increases leakage current. Our technique for localized strain re-distribution could be an effective tool to surrogate the influence of inherent localized strain build-up across the channel of electronic devices.

To study radiation effects, we exposed the HEMTs to gamma rays (up to 10 megaRads dose at 180 kiloRads per hour). We report the thermal and mechanical responses in terms of the changes in lattice strain and temperature, which were simultaneously characterized by changes in phonon frequency of E2 (high) and A1 (LO) from on- state and unpowered/pinched off reference states. Lower doses of radiation improved the electrical properties, however degradation initiated at about 1 megaRads. We observed about 16% decrease in saturation current and 6% decrease in transconductance at the highest dose. However, leakage current increase by 3 orders of magnitude was the most notable radiation effect. We observed temperature increase by 40% and mechanical stress increase by a factor of three at dose of 10 megaRads compared to the pristine devices. Spatial mapping of mechanical stress along the channel identifies the gate region as mechanically affected area, whereas the thermal degradation was mostly uniform. Transmission electron microscopy showed contrast changes reflecting high vacancy concentration in the gate region. These findings suggest that localized stress (mechanical hotspots) may increases vulnerability to radiation damage by accommodating higher concentration of defects that promote leakage current.

Finally, we present experimental results on a novel concept of electron wind force driven room temperature annealing of GaN and SiC devices. This technique was applied on Gamma irradiated HEMT and SiC diodes. We demonstrate full recovery of the HEMTs irradiated to 10 mega-Rads gamma radiation. About 200% performance improvement was recorded for the SiC diodes. Our hypothesis is that mechanical stress waves are instrumental in eliminating interfacial defects.