Background Impurity Reduction and Iron Doping of Gallium Nitride Wafers

Abstract

ABSTRACTBackground impurities and the resulting electrical characteristics were studied for GaN wafers grown using hydride vapor phase epitaxy at various growth conditions. The electron concentration was found to decrease with increasing GaN thickness, by orders of magnitude in the first few microns of growth, but continuing gradually for thousands of microns. Physical removal of the backside degenerate layer enabled improved analysis of the electrical properties. Secondary ion mass spectroscopy was used to determine that the presence of oxygen and silicon accounted for the electron concentration for unintentionally n-type doped material. The concentration of oxygen was found to vary more than that of silicon and increased with decreasing growth temperature. The resistivity was measured to be as high as 1 ohm-cm, corresponding to a carrier concentration of 1016 cm−3. Iron was demonstrated to effectively compensate the residual donors and increased the resistivity to greater than 109 ohm-cm at room temperature and greater than 3×105 ohm-cm at 250 °C. An activation energy for the iron-doped GaN was determined by variable temperature resistivity measurements to be 0.51 eV.