Considerable amount of work has been done in studying the relationship between the contact resistance and the microstructure of the Au-Ge-Ni based ohmic contacts to n-GaAs. It has been found that the lower contact resistivity is due to the presence of Ge rich and Au free regions (good contact area) in contact with GaAs. Thus in order to obtain an ohmic contact with lower contact resistance one should obtain a uniformly alloyed region of good contact areas almost everywhere. This can possibly be accomplished by utilizing various alloying schemes. In this work microstructural characterization, employing TEM techniques, of the sequentially deposited Au-Ge-Ni based ohmic contact to the MODFET device is presented.The substrate used in the present work consists of 1 μm thick buffer layer of GaAs grown on a semi-insulating GaAs substrate followed by a 25 Å spacer layer of undoped AlGaAs.
