Origins of the Schottky barrier to a 2DHG in a Au/Ni/GaN/AlGaN/GaN heterostructure

We report the influence of thickness of an undoped GaN (u-GaN) layer on current transport to a 2DHG through the metal/p++GaN contact in a GaN/AlGaN/GaN heterostructure. The current is dominated by an internal potential barrier of 0.2–0.27 eV at the p+ GaN/u-GaN, which increases with thickness from 5 to 15 nm and remains constant thereafter due to Fermi pinning by a defect at ∼0.6 eV from the top valence band. We also report a nonideality factor, n, between 6 and 12, for the combined tunneling current through the p+GaN/u-GaN to the 2DHG. Our contact resistivity of 5.3 × 10–4 Ω cm2 and hole mobility, μ, of ∼15.65 cm2/V s are the best-in-class for this metal stack on a GaN/AlGaN/GaN heterostructure, reported to date.