Dislocation reduction mechanism os GaN films on vicinal sapphire substrates

Abstract

<sec>GaN materials are widely used in optoelectronic devices, high-power devices and high-frequency microwave devices because of their excellent characteristics, such as wide frequency band, high breakdown electric field, high thermal conductivity, and direct band gap. Owing to the large lattice mismatch and thermal mismatch brought by the heterogeneous epitaxy of GaN material, the GaN epitaxial layer will produce a great many dislocations in the growth process, resulting in the poor crystal quality of GaN material and the difficulty in further improving the device performance. Therefore, researchers have proposed the use of vicinal substrate to reduce the dislocation density of GaN material, but the dislocation annihilation mechanism in GaN film on vicinal substrate has not been sufficiently studied. Therefore, in this paper, GaN thin films are grown on vicinal sapphire substrates at different angles by using metal organic chemical vapor deposition technique. Atomic force microscope, high resolution X-ray diffractometer, photoluminescence testing, and transmission electron microscopy are used to analyze in detail the effects of vicinal substrates on GaN materials. The use of vicinal substrates can significantly reduce the dislocation density of GaN materials, but lead to degradation of their surface morphology morphologies. And the larger the substrate vicinal angle, the lower the dislocation density of the sample is. The dislocation density of the sample with a 5º bevel cut on the substrate is reduced by about one-third compared to that of the sample with a flat substrate. The special dislocation termination on the mitered substrate is observed by transmission electron microscopy, which is one of the main reasons for the reducing the dislocation density on the mitered substrate. The step merging on the vicinal sapphire substrate surface leads to both transverse growth and longitudinal growth of GaN in the growth process. The transverse growth region blocks the dislocations, resulting in an abrupt interruption of the dislocations during propagation, which in turn reduces the dislocation density.</sec><sec>Based on the above phenomena, a model of GaN growth on vicinal substrate is proposed to explain the reason why the quality of GaN crystal can be improved by vicinal substrate.</sec>