Investigations on high and low energy radiation effects on AlGaN GaN HFET devices and thick GaN layer

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to study some of the important basic and technological issues associated with irradiation effects on AlGaN GaN Heterostructure Field Effect Transistor HFET devices and GaN layer The choice of the species for the irradiation experiments is dictated by the fact that the space environment consists of 85 protons 14 alpha particles and 1 heavy ions Consequently protons were selected for the investigations in order to simulate the Van Allen belts radiation The proton energies in the belts extend up to 100 MeV The 1 heavy ions are a mixture of practically all elements of the periodic table with carbon oxygen and iron being the most abundant species All components of the radiation environment can cause a variety of effects on semiconductor devices They have to be studied and understood in order to avoid or at least limit the newlinedamage of electronic devices for applications such as satellites space stations newlineshuttles and even high flying aircrafts For this reasons irradiation experiments were carried out with protons and ions of carbon oxygen iron krypton both at low and high energy with different fluencies newline