III–V Nitrides: A New Age for Optoelectronics

Abstract

With the advent of bright-blue light-emitting diodes in 1994, violet laser diodes in 1996, and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers at telecommunications wavelengths in 2000, all based on nitride-containing III–V compounds, a new age for optoelectronics began. Despite their technological success, III-nitride materials still hold some mysteries. Compared with conventional III–V semiconductors, even commercial nitride devices are of poor material quality. Due to their heteroepitaxial origin, their crystals are full of dislocations. Electrical properties, particularly in the case of p-type material, are fairly unsatisfactory. Still, light-emitting diodes with extremely high brightness and lasers with high power and good lifetime can be produced with III–V nitride compounds. In this review, we will give an overview of the essential properties of nitride materials for optoelectronic devices, their current development status, open questions, and recent device achievements.

Epitaxial growth and interfaces of high-quality InN films grown on nitrided sapphire substrates

“…1,2 Moreover, InN has a direct band gap of ;0.7 eV which enables the III-nitride semiconductors to cover the wave length from deep ultraviolet (AlN, Eg 5 6.2 eV) to near infrared (InN, Eg 5 0.7 eV). 3,4 InN has shown great potential in the fields of terahertz emitters, [5][6][7][8] light-emitting 9 and photovoltaic applications, 10 etc. In 1972, Hovel and Cuomo 11 grew InN thin films on sapphire by using radio-frequency sputtering for the first time.…”

InGaN/GaN quantum wells with low growth temperature GaN cap layers

“…The development of wide bandgap nitride semiconductors over the last 10 years has opened up a number of applications, including blue lasers for next generation data storage, white light emitters and solar blind UV photodiodes [1][2][3]. InGaN is used as the active layer in the vast majority of blue and near-UV nitride-based emitters and hence the optimization of InGaN quantum wells (QW) is very important.…”

LED and Phototransistor Simulation

“…In the 1960s, the first GaAs-based near-infrared semiconductor lasers and red-orange light-emitting diodes were introduced by Nick Holonyak and Mary George Craford. In parallel to that development, photodetectors based on III-V semiconductors were developed [4,7]. In 1963, Zhores Ivanovich Alferov proposed the idea of using nanoheterojunctions (NH) in emitters (Figure 5).…”