Air-bridged lateral epitaxial overgrowth of GaN thin films

Abstract

A promising technique of selective lateral epitaxy, namely air-bridged lateral epitaxial overgrowth, is demonstrated in order to reduce the wing tilt as well as the threading dislocation density in GaN thin films. A seed GaN layer was etched to make ridge-stripe along 〈11̄00〉GaN direction and a GaN material was regrown from the exposed (0001) top facet of the ridged GaN seed structures, whose sidewalls and etched bottoms were covered with silicon nitride mask, using low-pressure metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy. The density of dislocations in the wing region was reduced to be <107 cm−2, which was at least two orders of magnitude lower than that of underlying GaN. The magnitude of the wing tilt was determined to be 0.08° by x-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements, which was smaller than other lateral epitaxial overgrown GaN thin films. The full width at half maximum of XRD for the wing region was 138 arc sec, indicating high uniformity of c-axis orientation.