Plasma-assisted atomic layer epitaxial growth of aluminum nitride studied with real time grazing angle small angle x-ray scattering
Abstract
Wide bandgap semiconducting nitrides have found wide-spread application as light emitting and laser diodes and are under investigation for further application in optoelectronics, photovoltaics, and efficient power switching technologies. Alloys of the binary semiconductors allow adjustments of the band gap, an important semiconductor material characteristic, which is 6.2 eV for aluminum nitride (AlN), 3.4 eV for gallium nitride, and 0.7 eV for (InN). Currently, the highest quality III-nitride films are deposited by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition and molecular beam epitaxy. Temperatures of 900 °C and higher are required to deposit high quality AlN. Research into depositing III-nitrides with atomic layer epitaxy (ALEp) is ongoing because it is a fabrication friendly technique allowing lower growth temperatures. Because it is a relatively new technique, there is insufficient understanding of the ALEp growth mechanism which will be essential to development of the process. Here, grazing incidence small angle x-ray scattering is employed to observe the evolving behavior of the surface morphology during growth of AlN by ALEp at temperatures from 360 to 480 °C. Increased temperatures of AlN resulted in lower impurities and relatively fewer features with short range correlations.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Mar 27, 2017
- Source ID
- 10.1116/1.4979007
Entities
People
- Alexander C. Kozen
- Alexander Demasi
- Anindya Nath
- Charles. R. Eddy Jr.
- Jennifer K Hite
- Karl F. Ludwig Jr.
- Neeraj Nepal
- S. B. Qadri
- Scooter D. Johnson
- Virginia R. Anderson
- Zachary R. Robinson
Organizations
- American Society for Engineering Education
- Boston University
- George Mason University
- Office of Naval Research
- State University of New York at Brockport
- United States Naval Research Laboratory