Wet Thermal Oxidation of GaAs and GaN

Abstract

The chapter is devoted to the thermal wet oxidation of AIIIBV semiconductor compounds, mainly to gallium arsenide and gallium nitride. It has been divided into several topics, containing of monoclinic gallium oxide1 -Ga2O3 properties data, techniques of oxide fabrication and application description. In the first part, properties of mentioned semiconductor’s oxides are characterized. Then methods of manufacturing with a special attention for wet thermal oxidation are described. After that, applications of gallium oxide structures in electronics are given. It focuses also on the semiconductor structures dedicated for gas sensors application while gallium oxide layers improve significantly the most critical parameters of the detector compared to those containing of e.g. SnO2. AIIIBV and AIIIN semiconductors compounds are wide known as materials for optoelectronics devices. They are used often also to the construction of high temperature and microwave devices or chemical gas sensors. In these applications dielectric layers are necessary. There is a possibility of using their own oxides – Ga2O3 gives a chance to manufacture many different devices – MOS structures (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor). It can be MOS capacitors, power Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs), high mobility GaAs MOSFETs or gate turn-off thyristors and, probably, CMOS applications (Pearton et al., 1999; Wu et al., 2003). The MOS-gate version of the HEMT has significantly better thermal stability than a metal-gate structure and is well suited to gas sensing (Schweben et al., 1998; Baban et al., 2005; Hong et al., 2007).