Cornell-led Team Creates Gallium Nitride Power Diode

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Making tiny switches do enormous jobs in a more efficient way than current technology allows is one of the goals of a research team led by Cornell engineering professor Huili (Grace) Xing.

Xing and her group – which includes her husband, Debdeep Jena, also an engineering professor at Cornell – have created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches. The group built a GaN power-switching device, approximately one-fifth the width of a human hair, that could support 2,000 volts of electricity.

With silicon-based semiconductors rapidly approaching their performance limits in electronics, GaN is seen as the next generation in power control and conversion. Applications span nearly all electronics products and electricity distribution infrastructure.

“With some of these new materials, it’s actually conceivable now to shrink medium-scale power-distribution systems onto a chip,” Jena said. “Looking into the future, this is one of the goals, and it’s not a moonshot. It’s possible, but the materials have to be right, the design has to be right.”

The team’s work was published Dec. 15 in the journal Applied Physics Letters, a publication of the American Institute of Physics. The group includes researchers from Cornell, the University of Notre Dame – from where Xing and Jena arrived at Cornell last year – and the semiconductor company IQE.

Xing said the key to her team’s discovery was building the device on a GaN base layer that contained relatively few energy-sapping defects, in comparison to traditional silicon-based substrates.

“We’re going to take the defects, some of them anyway, out of the equation,” said Xing, the Richard Lundquist Sesquicentennial Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering. “Nothing can be 100 percent [free of defects], but we’re talking about improvements along an order of magnitude of up to 10,000 times.”

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