Reduction of dislocation density of aluminium nitride buffer layer grown on sapphire substrate

Abstract

An aluminium nitride (AlN) buffer layer with 200 nm thickness was grown on (0001) sapphire substrate using the metal-organic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE) method in a low-pressure furnace, followed by a clean-up treatment of sapphire substrate at 1100 o C. Thereafter, the AlN buffer layer was annealed at a high temperature in the range of 1500 o C to 1700 o C for 2 hours under the atmosphere of N2+CO. The objective of this research is to determine the microstructure changes with different annealing temperatures. Cross-sectional TEM has revealed that, after annealing at 1500 o C, two types of defects remained in the AlN buffer layer: inverted cone shape domains and threading dislocations. The former domains were observed in an image taken with diffraction of g=0002, but not in an image with g=101 ̅ 0. The morphology and the diffraction condition for the image contrast strongly, suggesting that the domains are inversion domains. The threading dislocations were invisible in the image taken with the diffraction of g=0002, revealing that they were a-type dislocations. However, after annealing at 1600 o C, the inversion domains coalesced with each other to give a two-layer structure divided by a single inversion domain boundary at the centre of the AlN buffer layer. The density of threading dislocation was roughly estimated to be 5×10 9 cm -2 after annealing at 1500 o C, and to be reduced to 5×10 8 cm -2 after annealing at 1600 o C. These experimental results validate the fact that the annealing temperature around 1600 o C is high enough to remove the defects by the diffusion process. Therefore, it was discovered that high temperature annealing is an effective treatment to alter the microstructure of AlN thin films and remove defects by the diffusion process. Annealing at high temperature is recommended to increase the emission efficiency for fabrication of optoelectronic devices.

Structural and mechanical characterisation of the chromium nitride hard coating deposited on the silicon and glass substrate

“…For tribological and hard coating applications, the coating must possess good wear resistance, high hardness resistance and corrosion resistant properties, as reported in the literature [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. To deposit the hard coating, sputtering is normally used from the available processes because of its high deposition rate, thin compound nature with controlled stoichiometry, simplicity and cost-effectiveness compared to the radio frequency (RF) system.…”

Crystal mosaicity determined by a novel layer deconvolution Williamson–Hall method

“…[24][25][26] The variation of temperature, although favorable for decreasing the dislocation density can induce strain heterogeneities often visible in the electron microscopy techniques. 27,28 In the present work, a tentative linearization method of the WH plots is presented and compared to conventional WH method for wurtzite aluminum gallium nitride and for orthorhombic molybdenum trioxide compounds, respectively. Although, to the best knowledge of the authors, it is the first time that analysis of size/strain plotting methods is applied directly to the latter, molybdenum trioxide has been used to study the mosaicity of mechanochemical reduction of powder MoO 3 by silicone to synthesize nanocrystalline MoSi 2 29 , nano-crystalline MoO 2 30 and hexagonal (h)-MoO 3 nanorods.…”