Sandwich method to grow high quality AlN by MOCVD

Abstract

We report pulsed atomic layer epitaxy growth of a very high crystalline quality, thick (~2 µm) and crack-free AlN material on c-plane sapphire substrates via a sandwich method using metal organic chemical vapor deposition. This sandwich method involves the introduction of a relatively low temperature (1050 °C) 1500 nm thick AlN layer between two 250 nm thick AlN layers which are grown at higher temperature (1170 °C). The surface morphology and crystalline quality remarkably improve using this sandwich method. A 2 µm thick AlN layer was realized with 33 arcsec and 136 arcsec full width at half maximum values for symmetric and asymmetric reflections of ω-scan, respectively, and it has an atomic force microscopy root-mean-square surface roughness of ~0.71 nm for a 5 × 5 µm2 surface area.