GaN Vertical Power Devices: Challenges and Prospects

Mona A. Ebrish
Postdoctoral Fellow
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
ECSE Seminar Series
https://rensselaer.webex.com/rensselaer/j.php?MTID=m9c8347e4b20b530751912a15e76fa0e6
Wed, November 17, 2021 at 4:00 PM

GaN is a promising material for future power semiconductor devices due to its superior properties such as a wide band gap and high critical electric field. Recently, GaN-based vertical and lateral power devices have attracted significant interest due to encouraging device results coupled with progress in native substrate, epitaxial growth, and processing technology developments. This seminar will present an overview of the GaN power vertical device efforts at NRL. This research has four primary focus areas – 1) characterization of substrate materials and homoepitaxial layers to identify and mitigate performance limiting defects, 2) utilizing electroluminescence techniques to assess the performance of the vertical device with implanted edge termination extension, 3) manufacturing efforts for 2” wafer pilot production to assess wafer-to-wafer and within-wafer performance variation, and 4) process module development, particularly for selective area doping by ion implantation.

Mona A. Ebrish

Mona Ebrish is a Fulbright Scholar who received her B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from the
University of Tripoli, Libya. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2011, 2015 respectively, under the supervision of Professor Steven J. Koester. Mona’s Ph.D. dissertation is one of the earliest studies on utilizing the quantum capacitance effect in Graphene for sensing applications. Later she spent 4 years at IBM as an Advisory Research Scientist working on Si-CMOS scaling challenges. Currently she is a Postdoctoral fellow at the Naval Research Lab investigating wide-bandgap semiconductors for high-voltage applications. Her research resulted in more than a dozen patents and over 30 papers and abstracts in major journals and conferences.