Author(s): Wang, R (Wang, Rong); Xu, JX (Xu, Jianxing); Zhang, SY (Zhang, Shiyong); Zhang, Y (Zhang, Ying); Zheng, PH (Zheng, Penghui); Cheng, Z (Cheng, Zhe); Zhang, L (Zhang, Lian); Chen, FX (Chen, Feng-Xiang); Tong, XD (Tong, Xiaodong); Zhang, Y (Zhang, Yun); Tan, W (Tan, Wei)

Source: JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY C Volume: 9 Issue: 9 Pages: 3177-3182 DOI: 10.1039/d0tc05652a Published: MAR 7 2021

Abstract: Reduction of the reverse leakage current is critical to AlGaN/GaN heterostructures in high power and high frequency applications. Taking AlGaN/GaN Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) as an example, we demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that low-fluence neutron irradiation can be a promising way to reduce the reverse leakage current while maintaining other electronic properties almost unchanged. A clear physical picture is given to elucidate the mechanism, which includes three main scenarios: (i) in pre-irradiated AlGaN/GaN heterostructures grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) on sapphire substrates, the configuration of threading dislocations (DLs) is the mixture of pure DLs and DLs decorated by group-III vacancies (V-III-DLs); (ii) neutron scattered group-III interstitials are mobile and prone to passivate V-III-DLs, changing the configuration of DLs to monomorphic pure DLs; (iii) after the saturation of the passivation, neutron scattered group-III interstitials begin to escape from the system. The physical analysis is consistent with the trends in the experimental data. Our work provides a new post-processing treatment for reducing the reverse leakage current of AlGaN/GaN heterostructures grown by MOCVD on sapphire substrates.

Accession Number: WOS:000627556000015

ISSN: 2050-7526

eISSN: 2050-7534

Full Text: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/TC/D0TC05652A#!divAbstract