Pulsed laser annealing of Be-implanted GaN

Abstract

Postimplantation thermal processing of Be in molecular-beam-epitaxy-grown GaN by rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and pulsed laser annealing (PLA) was investigated. It has been found that the activation of Be dopants and the repair of implantation-induced defects in GaN films cannot be achieved efficiently by conventional RTA alone. On the other hand, good dopant activation and surface morphology and quality were obtained when the Be-implanted GaN film was annealed by PLA with a 248nm KrF excimer laser. However, observations of off-resonant micro-Raman and high-resolution x-ray-diffraction spectra indicated that crystal defects and strain resulting from Be implantation were still existent after PLA, which probably degraded the carrier mobility and limited the activation efficiency to some extent. This can be attributed to the shallow penetration depth of the 248nm laser in GaN, which only repaired the crystal defects in a thin near-surface layer, while the deeper defects were not annealed out well. This situation was significantly improved when the Be-implanted GaN was subjected to a combined process of PLA followed by RTA, which produced good activation of the dopants, good surface morphology, and repaired bulk and surface defects well.