High gain GaN/AlGaN heterojunction phototransistor

Wei Yang, Thomas Nohava, Subash Krishnankutty, Robert Torreano, Scott McPherson, and Holly Marsh
Citation: Applied Physics Letters 73, 978 (1998); doi: 10.1063/1.122058
View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.122058
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APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS

VOLUME 73, NUMBER 7

17 AUGUST 1998

High gain GaN/AlGaN heterojunction phototransistor

Wei Yang,a) Thomas Nohava, Subash Krishnankutty, Robert Torreano, Scott McPherson,
and Holly Marsh
Honeywell Technology Center, 12001 State Highway 55, Plymouth, Minnesota 55441

~Received 6 March 1998; accepted for publication 15 June 1998!

A GaN/AlGaN heterojunction bipolar phototransistor with gain in excess of 105 was demonstrated.
From 360 to 400 nm, an eight orders of magnitude drop in responsivity was achieved. The
phototransistor features a rapid electrical quenching of persistent photoconductivity, and exhibits
high dark impedance and no dc drift. By changing the frequency of the quenching cycles, the
detection speed of the phototransistor can be adjusted to accommodate specific applications. These
results represent an internal gain UV detector with significantly improved performance over
GaN-based photoconductors. 1998 American Institute of Physics. @S0003-6951~98!01233-9#

GaNAlGaN-based solidstate ultraviolet ~UV! photodetectors sensitive to 200365 nm UV radiation have been
actively sought for applications including solar-blind UV detection and flame sensing. Due to the direct band gap and
availability of Alx Ga12x N in the entire alloy composition
range (0,x,1), GaNAlGaN-based UV detectors have the
advantages of high quantum efficiency, tunability of cut-off
wavelengths, and capability of fabricating heterostructures.
In recent years GaNAlGaN photoconductors and photodiodes of both Schottky and p-i-n junctions with good performance have been reported.16 However, the need for internal gain in UV detectors remains to be stressed for low
light level applications, in which photodiodes often cannot
produce adequate signal levels for the read-out electronics.
Some attentions have been led to avalanche photodiodes
~APD! but very limited success has been indicated. Typically, a high leakage current is incurred in GaN p-n junctions before it reaches avalanche breakdown,7,8 most likely
due to the high defect density in III-nitride materials.
Photoconductors fabricated on certain undoped and Mgdoped GaN layers have shown high photocurrent gains.9,10
Such gains can be attributed to trapped charges ~e.g., holes!
which have very small recombination cross sections and give
rise to unusually long electron lifetime, and consequently
these devices exhibit persistent photoconductivity ~PPC! after UV exposure.11 Furthermore, PPC or dark current in GaN
photoconductors drifts with temperature which makes dc
measurement very difficult. These characteristics of photoconductors render them useful only in low speed ac mode
operations.
In addition to the above problems, the gains in GaN
photoconductors are essentially defect related effects ~i.e.,
traps giving long carrier lifetime!, therefore are sensitive to
the nature and density of the defects formed during the material growth. This gives rise to difficulties in producing consistent detector characteristics due to the fact that defects
formation in GaN is not well understood and controlled. It is
thus desirable to obtain internal gain based on more controllable and better understood processes.
In this letter we report the fabrication and characteristics
a!

Electronic mail: yang wei@htc.honeywell.com

of a GaN/AlGaN heterojunction bipolar phototransistor

which is shown in Fig. 1. The phototransistor is of n-p-i-n
configuration in which the emitter is an 0.5 mm Si-doped
n-GaN (n;1018 cm23), the base is a 0.2 mm Mg-doped
p-GaN, and the collector consists of a 0.3 mm undoped GaN
absorbing layer and a 1.7 mm n-Al0.2Ga0.8N transparent contact layer. The electrical contacts were made to the collector
and the emitter and the base is left floating. The UV light
enters from the substrate ~sapphire! side and transmits
through the n-AlGaN layer, and is absorbed in the undoped
GaN layer. The photogenerated electron-hole pairs are separated by the field in the i-GaN region, and in which the
electrons drift to the collector and the holes drift to the base
~Fig. 2!. The hole accumulation in the floating base lowers
the p-GaN base barrier, and increases electron injection from
the emitter and results in current gain. The gain is determined by the electron transit time across the base and the
hole trap time. In our floating-base device, the holes are not
drained through a third terminal therefore they are trapped in
the base until they recombine with the injected electrons
from the emitter. While this recombination process is rather
slow, an undesired persistent photoconductivity is expected.

FIG. 1. Structure of the n- p-i-n GaN/AlGaN heterojunction bipolar phototransistor.

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0003-6951/98/73(7)/978/3/$15.00
978
1998 American Institute of Physics
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Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 73, No. 7, 17 August 1998

FIG. 2. Band diagram of the GaN/AlGaN phototransistor.

However, we can remove the trapped holes by biasing the

detector to punch through and force the holes into the emitter, thus quickly reset or quench the detector. This useful
functionality does not exist in GaN and AlGaN photoconductors.
The above structure was grown on a 2 9 c-plane sapphire
wafer in a low pressure ~10 Torr! metalorganic chemical vapor deposition ~MOCVD! reactor, and triethylgallium
~TEG!, triethylaluminum ~TEA!, and ammonia (NH3) were
used as precursors. A 250 AlN buffer layer was grown at
625 C prior to the growth of the rest of the structure at
1050 C. The phototransistor fabrication was accomplished
by mesa etching followed by n-type ohmic contacts to the
emitter and the collector. For the mesa etching, we used 10
mT BCl31Cl2 reactive ion etch ~RIE! with a 0.5 mm SiO2
mask. For ohmic contacts, Ti/Al ~500 /5000 ! was evaporated on the n-GaN and n-AlGaN layers and annealed at
700 C for 10 s in a rapid thermal annealer.
The I V characteristics of the phototransistor with a
0.049 mm2 active area under UV illumination and dark conditions are shown in Fig. 3. The curves were taken immediately after a 15 V quenching bias was applied on the collector. A low dark current and a large photoresponse were
observed under 14 V collector biases. The photoresponse of

Yang et al.

979

FIG. 4. Responsivity as a function of light intensity measured using 359 nm

UV and 10 Hz quenching frequency.

the phototransistor was comparable to typical GaN photoconductors but the dark impedance was much higher. Without the quenching bias, however, the phototransistor exhibited persistent photoconductivity after UV exposure and
would not return to high dark impedance, which is similar to
GaN photoconductors. The major advantage of the phototransistor over photoconductors is the new functionality
that enables electrical quenching of the persistent photoconductivity. This allows the phototransistor to operate without
PPC and dc drift and with much lower dark current. It also
gives the flexibility to change electrical bandwidth and gain
of the detector required for specific applications.
The responsivity measurement was performed under 10
Hz quenching-measuring cycles in which the device is subject to a 710 V pulse and then biased at 34 V to measure
photocurrent. In this scheme the quenching frequency determines the electrical bandwidth and the gain of the phototransistor, which roughly follow the constant gainbandwidth product trade-off relationship. The light source
was a xenon lamp and a wavelength selecting monochromater calibrated with a UV enhanced Si photodetector. The
responsivity as a function of light intensity is shown in Fig.
4. At 5 nW/cm2 we measured responsivity as high as 5
3104 A/W, corresponding to quantum gain of 1.73105 . The
decrease of responsivity at higher intensities is due to reduced hole lifetime in the base caused by increased electron

FIG. 5. Spectral photoresponse of the GaN/AlGaN phototransistor showing

FIG. 3. I Vas
characteristics
of the
GaN/AlGaN
phototransistor
ofsubject
0.049 to the
a sharp
at 365 nm and eight orders of magnitude
responsivitytodrop
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from 360 to 400 nm.
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980

Yang et al.

Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 73, No. 7, 17 August 1998

trons on the conduction band but also leave long-lived immobile charged gap states in the active region. Since the
immobile charges equally affect the potential in the active
region as trapped holes, they contribute to the gain just as the
trapped holes, even though the lifetime of the charged states
may be different. Therefore in photoconductors the undesired h n ,E g photoconductivity is substantially amplified. In
the phototransistor @Fig. 6~b!#, the h n ,E g photon generated
immobile charges in the collector-base junction, or in the
emitter, cannot drift to the base, therefore they do not affect
the base barrier height and thus contribute no gain. In addition, during the quenching bias ~punch through!, a lot of
electrons are injected into the base and collector, and immediately after the quenching most gap states in the undoped
GaN region are filled with electrons, therefore transitions
from the valence band to these states are not likely. Finally,
if the h n ,E g photons are absorbed in the p-GaN base, they
can only produce holes and trapped electrons and add zero
net charge to the base. Therefore, in the GaN/AlGaN phototransistors the h n ,E g photons produce much lower photocurrent than in GaN photoconductors as demonstrated in
our results.

FIG. 6. Comparison of photoresponses for h n ,E g in photoconductor and

phototransistor.

injection and therefore higher recombination rate. The spectral photoresponse ~Fig. 5! shows a sharp long wavelength
cutoff at 365 nm and a short wavelength cutoff at 315 nm.
The 365 nm cutoff is due to photogeneration in the i-GaN
layer, and the 315 nm short wavelength cutoff is due to the
absorption by the 1.7 mm n-Al0.2Ga0.8N collector.
Despite the high gain in the UV region, the phototransistor exhibits extremely small photoresponse at 400 nm and
longer wavelengths. From 360 to 400 nm, an eight orders of
magnitude drop in responsivity was measured as shown in
Fig. 5. This ratio is about 45 orders of magnitude higher
than typical GaN photoconductors. Here we offer an explanation to this improvement as illustrated in Fig. 6 and as
follows. The long wavelength response in photoconductors,
as shown in Fig. 6~a!, is caused by transitions of electrons
from deep donor states to the conduction band by h n ,E g
photons excitation. These transitions not only generate elec-

This work was supported by Air Force Wright Laboratory under Contract No. F33615-95-C-1618 monitored by
Gary Smith. The authors acknowledge helpful discussions
with Professor Paul Ruden of University of Minnesota and
Professor Hadis Morkoc of University of Illinois.
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