Monolithic micro-fabrication of Si micro-electro-mechanical structure with GaN light emitting diode

Abstract

Si micro-electro-mechanical device with GaN light emitting diode (LED) is monolithically fabricated. The GaN-LED layer was grown by molecular beam epitaxy on Si wafer and the basic properties of the LED were tested. The GaN/Si wafer was micromachined using deep reactive ion etching to fabricate Si electrostatic comb-drive actuator. A light distribution variable device with Si actuator was fabricated from the grown wafer. From those experiments, it is shown that the combination of the GaN crystal growth on Si wafer and the Si micromachining is valuable for a new kind of optical micro-systems.

Fabrication of GaN light emitting diode membrane on Si substrate for MEMS applications

“…The crystals were likely to become nano-columns of the diameter around 150 nm (Hu et al 2006). Although the nano-column crystals had several unique properties and we successfully fabricated the nanocolumn LED on Si substrate (Ito et al 2010), the special technique was needed for filling the spaces between the nano-columns to fabricate the electrode on p-GaN layer.…”

“…Especially, the integration of GaN LED and Si-MEMS is attractive for many applications in optical MEMS. Some examples are optical flying head for data storage (Bu et al 2003), optical scanner with light source (Ito et al 2010;Sasaki et al 2003), l-TAS with fluorescent detection system (Chabinyc et al 2001;Kamei et al 2003;Edel et al 2004;Yao et al 2005), etc.…”

“…Several GaN sensors on Si-MEMS structures are proposed and demonstrated (Cimalla et al 2007). In addition, monolithic fabrication of GaN LED and Si-MEMS is also reported (Ito et al 2010). However, many basic characteristics of the monolithic integration of GaN and Si-MEMS are still unrevealed.…”