Effects of Surface Roughness and Thermal Treatment of Buffer Layer on the Quality of GaN Epitaxial Layers

Heteroepitaxial GaN films were grown on sapphire substrates in order to study the effects of the buffer layer's surface roughness and thermal treatment on the epitaxial layer's quality. For this, GaN buffer layers were grown at $550^{\circ}C$ with various TMGa flow rates and durations of growth, and annealed at $1010^{\circ}C$ for 3 min after the temperature was raised by 23 ~ $92^{\circ}C/min$, and then GaN epitaxial layers were grown at $1000^{\circ}C$. It has been found that the buffer layer's surface roughness and the thermal treatment condition are critical factors on the quality of the epitaxial layer. When a buffer layer was frown with a TMGa flow rate of $24\mu mole/min$ for 30 sec, the surface roughness of the buffer lather was minimum and when the thermal ramping rate was $30.6^{\circ}C/min$ on this layer, the successively grown epitaxial layer's crystalline and optical qualities were optimized with a specular morphology. The minimum full width at half maximum(FWHM) of GaN(0002) x-ray diffraction peak and that of near-band-edge(NBE) peak from a room temperature photoluminescence (PL) were 5 arcmin and 9 nm, respectively.

Buffer layer의 표면 거칠기와 열처리조건이 GaN 에픽층의 품질에 미치는 영향