ECE Distinguished Speaker Series: Huili Grace Xing, "High-Performance Electronics on the AlN Platform"

AlN has been ardently pursued as one of the most promising ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors (UWBGs) after GaN and SiC as the industry has been expanding rapidly on the high-volume manufacturing of GaN and SiC based technologies, including 12-inch GaN-on-Si, 8-inch SiC substrates and processing foundries etc. In this talk, I will present the findings in our journey in developing new RF and power electronic devices on AlN in the past decades, and I will focus on two examples: AlN XHEMTs and nitride CMOS. AlN XHEMT is a new family of high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) based on pseudomorphically strained channel on AlN. Both the top and bottom AlN/GaN interfaces have been carefully examined and improved along with the carrier transport in a thin GaN channel up to 20 nm. However, the first generations of AlN XHEMTs delivered RF performance about 1/10th of expected. What has been limiting the RF performance of these AlN XHEMTs? We are finally able to answer this question in our recent work, which is surprising but not unexpected. The fundamental understanding of the 2D hole gas residing at the GaN/AlN interface leads to new approaches to realize high-performance p-channel GaN FETs, promising >10X improvement over the statement of the art. Huili Grace Xing is currently the Director of SUPREME - a SRC JUMP2.0 research center, the William L. Quackenbush Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University, and having served as the Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Studies of the College of Engineering in 2020-2022. She is a recipient of the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, ISCS Young Scientist Award, Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, the SIA/SRC University Researcher Award, the Cornell Engineering Research Excellence Award and Michael Tien'72 Teaching Award. She is a fellow of APS, IEEE & AAAS.