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A method for suppressing impurities in GaN thin films grown via plasma-enhanced atomic deposition (PEALD) through the in situ pretreatment of Si (100) substrate with plasma was developed. This approach leads to a superior GaN/Si (100) interface. After pretreatment, the thickness of the interfacial layer between GaN films and the substrates decreases from 2.0 to 1.6 nm, and the oxygen impurity content at the GaN/ Si (100) interface reduces from 34 to 12%. The pretreated GaN films exhibit thinner amorphous transition GaN layer of 5.3 nm in comparison with those nonpretreated of 18.0 nm, which indicates the improvement of crystallinity of GaN. High-quality GaN films with enhanced density are obtained because of the pretreatment. This promising approach is considered to facilitate the growth of high-quality thin films via PEALD.

Polycrystalline gallium nitride (GaN) thin films were deposited on Si (100) substrates via plasma-enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) under optimal deposition parameters. In this work, we focus on the research of the GaN/Si (100) interfacial properties. The x-ray reflectivity measurements show the clearly-resolved fringes for all the as-grown GaN films, which reveals a perfectly smooth interface between the GaN film and Si (100), and this feature of sharp interface is further confirmed by high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM). However, an amorphous interfacial layer (∼ 2 nm) can be observed from the HRTEM images, and is determined to be mixture of Ga x O y and GaN by xray photoelectron spectroscopy. To investigate the effect of this interlayer on the GaN growth, an AlN buffer layer was employed for GaN deposition. No interlayer is observed between GaN and AlN, and GaN shows better crystallization and lower oxygen impurity during the initial growth stage than the GaN with an interlayer.

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