A review on GaN HEMTs:nonlinear mechanisms and improvement methods

The GaN HEMT is a potential candidate for RF applications due to the high frequency and large power handling capability.To ensure the quality of the communication signal,linearity is a key parameter during the system design.However,the GaN HEMT usually suffers from the nonlinearity problems induced by the nonlinear parasitic capacitance,transconductance,channel transconductance etc.Among them,the transconductance reduction is the main contributor for the nonlinearity and is mostly attributed to the scattering effect,the increasing resistance of access region,the self-heating effect and the trapping effects.Based on the mechanisms,device-level improvement methods of transconductance including the trapping suppression,the nanowire channel,the graded channel,the double channel,the transconductance compensation and the new material structures have been proposed recently.The features of each method are reviewed and compared to provide an overview perspective on the linearity of the GaN HEMT at the device level.

Codebook Design and Beam Training for Extremely Large-Scale RIS:Far-Field or Near-Field?

Reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS)is more likely to develop into extremely large-scale RIS(XL-RIS)to efficiently boost the system capacity for future 6 G communications.Beam training is an effective way to acquire channel state information(CSI)for XL-RIS.Existing beam training schemes rely on the far-field codebook.However,due to the large aperture of XL-RIS,the scatters are more likely to be in the near-field region of XL-RIS.The far-field codebook mismatches the near-field channel model.Thus,the existing far-field beam training scheme will cause severe performance loss in the XL-RIS assisted nearfield communications.To solve this problem,we propose the efficient near-field beam training schemes by designing the near-field codebook to match the nearfield channel model.Specifically,we firstly design the near-field codebook by considering the near-field cascaded array steering vector of XL-RIS.Then,the optimal codeword for XL-RIS is obtained by the exhausted training procedure.To reduce the beam training overhead,we further design a hierarchical nearfield codebook and propose the corresponding hierarchical near-field beam training scheme,where different levels of sub-codebooks are searched in turn with reduced codebook size.Simulation results show the proposed near-field beam training schemes outperform the existing far-field beam training scheme.

Recent progress of physical failure analysis of GaN HEMTs

Gallium nitride(GaN)-based high-electron mobility transistors(HEMTs) are widely used in high power and high frequency application fields, due to the outstanding physical and chemical properties of the GaN material. However, GaN HEMTs suffer from degradations and even failures during practical applications, making physical analyses of post-failure devices extremely significant for reliability improvements and further device optimizations. In this paper, common physical characterization techniques for post failure analyses are introduced, several failure mechanisms and corresponding failure phenomena are reviewed and summarized, and finally device optimization methods are discussed.