Proposal of oxide-formed two-step wet etching process for n-GaN

Abstract

We have investigated a wet etching process for n-GaN in order to ultimately develop a low damage and highly controllable etching process that can be applied to device fabrication and which also has the merits of cost and convenience. For this purpose, we propose a GaN oxide-formed two-step wet etching process which consists of (i) the electrochemical oxidation of GaN (anodization), and (ii) the chemical etching of GaN oxide formed in process (i). With this two-step wet etching process, we have successfully performed the wet etching of a patterned area of n-GaN without the aid of light irradiation.