FET noise studies

The GaAs FET oscillator is an alternative device for voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) applications because of its inherent wide-band electronic tunability, the variety of operating modes possible such as common source, common gate, etc., and the ease of circuit design. However, it has one major drawback, namely, its high near-carrier 1/f noise which makes it unsuitable for many applications, such as radar systems. This report describes the progress made during the report period in understanding the physical mechanisms responsible for this noise. During this period, an extensive experimental study was made of the 1/f noise properties of a variety of oscillators constructed of FET chips fabricated under controlled conditions. Using in-house grown epitaxial wafers, FET's were fabricated from both buffered and unbuffered active layers, with and without epitaxially grown contact layers, and with and without surface passivation. The experimental results show a good correlation between the trap-generated 1/f baseband noise and the near-carrier 1/f FM noise. The primary sources of the noise are presumed to be either deep traps within the depletion layer under the gate or surface states at the gate-semiconductor interface, probably the latter. An improvement of the order of 10 dB in the near carrier FM noise level is obtained when a buffer layer separates the active layer from the substrate. Optical experiments indicated an electron trap level approximately 0.41 eV below the conduction band. A noise model was devised to explain the modulation process for upconverting baseband 1/f noise to the carrier band by depletion layer modulation.