Thermal stability and barrier height enhancement for refractory metal nitride contacts on GaAs

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Abstract
Self‐aligned GaAs metal‐semiconductor field‐effect transistor process requires a very thermally stable gate material which must maintain good Schottky contact with GaAs after high‐temperature annealing. The electrical characteristics of rf‐sputtered ZrN, TiN, and NbN contacts on n‐GaAs substrate have been investigated as a function of annealing temperature. We show that all these refractory metal nitride contacts on GaAs have ideality factors very close to unity after annealing at temperatures as high as 850 °C. The barrier height for these contacts increases with annealing temperature and very low reverse leakage current is obtained. We also observe similar behavior from previous work on WN/GaAs contacts. Such barrier height enhancement at elevated temperatures has been attributed to the incorporation of nitrogen into GaAs near the metal/GaAs interface.

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