Gallium oxide (Ga2O3) is a highly promising ultrawide‐bandgap semiconductor for power electronics that emerged about a decade ago. Epitaxial growth Ga2O3at the small scale is demonstrated. In order to develop scalable manufacturing of high‐performance epitaxial structures, in‐depth understanding of the fundamental growth processes, control parameters, and mechanism is imperative. This review discusses the recent progress in epitaxial growth of β‐Ga2O3films and highlights challenges in obtaining high growth rate, low defects, and high carrier mobilities. Compared with the other epitaxy methods, metal–organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) offers a wider growth window and precursor selection option, to minimize the tradeoff between crystal quality and growth rate. Growth rate is inversely proportional to temperature, within a certain temperature window, because of the unavoidable premature gas‐phase reactions and desorption of the highly volatile gallium suboxide (Ga2O) at elevated temperatures. Growth defects, background impurity incorporation, and carrier mobilities can be affected by the choice of MOCVD precursors, nucleation, and adsorption/desorption/diffusion of adatoms on substrate surfaces of different orientations, including the effect of growing on cleavage and noncleavage planes. This review summarizes the current status of the epitaxial growth of β‐Ga2O3and analyzes the major factors that enhance mobility and reduce background doping concentration. The insights gained help advance the manufacturability of device‐grade epitaxial thin films.
This content will become publicly available on June 7, 2024
Tutorial: Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition of β -Ga2O3 thin films, alloys, and heterostructures
β-phase gallium oxide (Ga2O3) is an emerging ultrawide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductor with a bandgap energy of ∼ 4.8 eV and a predicted high critical electric field strength of ∼8 MV/cm, enabling promising applications in next generation high power electronics and deep ultraviolet optoelectronics. The advantages of Ga2O3 also stem from its availability of single crystal bulk native substrates synthesized from melt, and its well-controllable n-type doping from both bulk growth and thin film epitaxy. Among several thin film growth methods, metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) has been demonstrated as an enabling technology for developing high-quality epitaxy of Ga2O3 thin films, (AlxGa1−x)2O3 alloys, and heterostructures along various crystal orientations and with different phases. This tutorial summarizes the recent progresses in the epitaxial growth of β-Ga2O3 thin films via different growth methods, with a focus on the growth of Ga2O3 and its compositional alloys by MOCVD. The challenges for the epitaxial development of β-Ga2O3 are discussed, along with the opportunities of future works to enhance the state-of-the-art device performance based on this emerging UWBG semiconductor material system.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10436050
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Applied Physics
- Volume:
- 133
- Issue:
- 21
- ISSN:
- 0021-8979
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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