Highly chemical reactive ion etching of gallium nitride

Conference · Sat Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2000

OSTI ID:20104635

Karouta, F; Jacobs, B; Moerman, I; Jacobs, K; Weyher, J L; Porowski, S; Crane, R; Hageman, P R

A highly chemical reactive ion etching process has been developed for MOVPE-grown GaN on sapphire. The key element for the enhancement of the chemical property during etching is the use of a fluorine containing gas in a chlorine based chemistry. In the perspective of using GaN substrates for homo-epitaxy of high quality GaN/AlGaN structures they have used the above described RIE process to smoothen Ga-polar GaN substrates. The RMS value, measured by AFM, went from 20 {angstrom} (after mechanical polishing) down to 4 {angstrom} after 6 minutes of RIE. Etching N-polar GaN resulted in a higher etch rate than Ga-polar materials (165 vs. 110 nm/min) but the resulting surface was quite rough and suffers from instability problems. Heat treatment and HCl dip showed a partial recovery of Schottky characteristics after RIE.

• Research Organization: Eindhoven Univ. of Technology (NL)
• OSTI ID: 20104635
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
CHLORINE
ETCHING
EXPERIMENTAL DATA
FLUORINE
GALLIUM NITRIDES
IONS
MICROSCOPY
MORPHOLOGY
PLASMA
ROUGHNESS
THIN FILMS