Growth and characterization aluminum gallium nitride/gallium nitride heterostructures on silicon(111) wafers using various buffer layers

Devices based on nitride wide bandgap semiconductors are suitable for several promising applications such as blue lasers, LEDs, HEMTs etc. Due to the absence of bulk nitride crystals, nitride films are grown on lattice mismatched substrates like Al2O3 and 6H-SiC. However from a cost and integration standpoint silicon would be the substrate of choice for the growth of these materials. Nitride heterostructure growth on large area Si(111) is hence attempted by Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) in an modified AIX 200/4 system. The large lattice and thermal mismatch prevents the direct deposition of GaN on Si and also causes GaN layers grown on Si to crack severely. It is hence necessary to use buffer layers to alleviate this lattice and thermal mismatch. Several buffer layer schemes are used for this purpose. The crystal quality of the AlGaN/GaN heterostructures grown under various conditions on these buffers are studied using several methods like Photoluminescence, X-ray diffraction, Electron Microscopy etc. The quality of heterostructures grown on these buffers is compared in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each buffer and to also map the effects of process parameters on nitride layers deposited on each buffer.