A Strategic Review on Gallium Oxide Based Deep‐Ultraviolet Photodetectors: Recent Progress and Future Prospects

Abstract

With the use of UV‐C radiation sterilizers on the rise in the wake of the recent pandemic, it has become imperative to have health safety systems in place to curb the ill‐effects on humans. This requires detection systems with suitable spectral response to the “invisible to the naked eye” radiation leaks with utmost sensitivity and swiftness. State of the art deep‐UV photodetectors based on the wide bandgap material gallium oxide have achieved responsivities up to few hundred A W−1 while the minimum response time achieved is few hundred nanoseconds. However, due to the trade‐off between these two key parameters, the ultimate performance of the photodetectors remains inadequate. The focus here is to give a thorough review of the gallium oxide based photodetectors, their recent progress and future prospects. This review highlights the fundamental physics and the key parameters such as dark current, responsivity, and response time with their dependence on the material properties. Exploration of the reasons behind current scenario in the field of gallium oxide is comprehensively and critically analyzed. The key challenges which limit device performance and inhibit the realization of real‐world practical detectors are also described. The lacunae currently plaguing the field is also discussed with possible remedial solutions.

Control and understanding of metal contacts to β-Ga2O3 single crystals: a review

“…Many published review papers regarding β-Ga 2 O 3 single crystals in the literature are roughly categorized as follows: 1) growth and material properties of bulk β-Ga 2 O 3 [168,169,[176][177][178][179][180][181], bulk β-Ga 2 O 3 -based power/photonic devices [8,9,[182][183][184][185] and their combination [1,[186][187][188][189][190].…”

Recent progress of heterostructures based on two dimensional materials and wide bandgap semiconductors

“…[33][34][35][36][37][38] In the past few years, significant progress has been made on the two typical WBS: SiC [39] and GaN [34] , which exhibit great potential for applications in high-temperature, highpressure, high-power and high-frequency electronic devices due to their excellent thermal and electronic properties. [40][41][42][43] For SiC and GaN, the potential of application stems from its excellent physical and electronic properties. As shown in Table 1, the large band gap enables the device to operate at high temperature and low leakage currents, the high breakdown electric field and large electron saturation velocity enable SiC to generate high power at high frequencies.…”

(InxGa1−x)2O3 Thin Film Based Solar‐Blind Deep UV Photodetectors with Ultra‐High Detectivity and On/Off Current Ratio

“…Some reports have successfully fabricated phase stable (In x Ga 1−x ) 2 O 3 films and PD devices. [21][22][23][24][25][26][27] Although a high responsivity has been demonstrated, the PD devices commonly show poor sensitivity and detectivity due to the high background current. There is still plenty of room for improving the overall performance.…”