Gallium oxide devices for the next revolution in power electronics

Sponsored by University of Michigan EECS and IEEE SEM Trident Chapter.
Gallium oxide (Ga2O3) has excellent material properties especially for power device applications represented by the extremely large breakdown field of 8 MV/cm due to its large band gap of 4.5~4.9 eV. It is also attractive from an industrial viewpoint since large-size, high-quality wafers can be manufactured from a single-crystal bulk synthesized by melt-growth methods. These two features have drawn much attention to Ga2O3 as a new wide bandgap semiconductor following SiC and GaN.
In this seminar, I will talk about the recent progress in development on fundamental technologies of Ga2O3 power devices, covering single-crystal bulk and wafer production, homoepitaxial thin film growth by molecular beam epitaxy and halide vapor phase epitaxy, as well as device processing and characterization of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors and Schottky barrier diodes.

Masataka Higashiwaki received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees all in solid-state physics from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1994, 1996, and 1998, respectively. From 1998 to 2000, he continued his research on molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of self-organized GaAs quantum wires at Osaka University as a post doctorial research fellow. In 2000, he joined the Communications Research Laboratory (CRL), Tokyo, Japan, as a Researcher, where he was engaged in research and development on MBE growth and device processing of group-III nitride-based transistors. From 2004 to 2007, he was a Senior Researcher of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), which was renamed from CRL in 2004. From 2007 to 2010, he took a temporary leave from NICT and joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara as a Project Scientist. He returned to NICT in 2010 and started a pioneering work on Ga2O3-based electronics. He is now a Director at Green ICT Device Advanced Development Center.
Dr. Higashiwaki was a recipient of several awards for his work on GaN and Ga2O3-based devices, including the 2014 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Prize, the 2013 Frontier Technology Award of Fuji Sankei Business i, the 2009 The Research Encouragement Award of Marubun Research Promotion Foundation, the 2007 International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS) Young Scientist Award, and the 2006 Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP) Outstanding Achievement Award for the Best Original Paper. He has authored and co-authored over 160 papers in technical journals and international conferences.