Abstract

Growth of GaN under pressure from solution in gallium results in almost dislocation free plate-like crystals but with size limited to app. 1-2 cm (lateral) and 100 μm (thickness) or up to about 1cm long needles. Deposition of GaN by HVPE on the pressure grown seeds allows stable crystallization (in terms of flatness of the crystallization front and uniformity of the new grown material) at a rate of about 100 μm/h on both types of seed crystals. However, in the thick GaN crystals grown on almost dislocation free plate-like substrates quite a high number of dislocations appears if the crystal thickness exceeds certain critical value. Since the critical thickness for defect generation is of the order of 100 μm, almost dislocation free layers (density below 10 4 cm -2 ) thinner than 100 μm can be grown. The most obvious further step is removing the substrate and continuation of the HVPE deposition on the free standing low dislocation density layer of sub-critical thickness. The pressure grown substrates were removed by mechanical polishing or conductivity sensitive electrochemical etching (for strongly n-type substrates). Then the HVPE low dislocation density GaN 1 platelets were used as substrates for the growth of a few mm thick bulk GaN crystals. The crystals were characterized by defect selective etching of both polar (0001) and non-polar (10 10) surfaces to check presence and distribution of structural defects. The X-ray measurements allowed concluding about character of strain and deformation in high pressure GaN-HVPE GaN system.

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