title: A novel low temperature soft reflow process for the fabrication of deep-submicron (<0.35 μm) T-gate pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor structures.
abstract: We report a new and simple low temperature soft reflow process using solvent vapour. The combination of this soft reflow and conventional i-line lithography enables low cost, highly efficient fabrication at the deep-submicron scale. Compared to the conventional thermal reflow process, the key benefits of the new soft reflow process are its low temperature operation (<50 °C), greater shrinkage of the structure size (up to 75%) and better controllability. Gate openings reflowed from 1 μm to 250 nm have been routinely and reproducibly achieved by utilizing the saturation characteristics of the process. The feasibility of this soft reflow process is demonstrated in the fabrication of a 350 nm T-gate pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor. By shrinking the gate length by a factor of three (from a 1 μm initial opening), the output current is improved by 60% (500 mA mm(-1) from 300 mA mm(-1)) and f(T) and f(MAX) are increased to 70 GHz (from 20 GHz) and 120 GHz (from 40 GHz) respectively. The proposed soft reflow could potentially be applied on other compatible substrates such as polymer based material for organic or thin film devices, potentially leading to many new possible applications.
authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, Sackville Street Building, Sackville Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK.
authors: Ka Wa
authors: KW
authors: Ian
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Exarchos
authors: Mohamed
authors: M
authors: Missous