The growth, fabrication and characterization of high performance AI(formula)Ga(formula)N metal-semiconductor-metal photodiodes

Abstract

High performance UV photodetectors have attracted unwarranted attention for various applications, such as in military, telecommunication, and biological imaging, as an AlxGa1-xN material system is also rather suitable for such applications. Its direct band gap covers the spectrum from 200 nm to 360 nm by way of changing the Al concentration in the compound. In this present thesis, the design and growth of an Al0.75Ga0.25N template on sapphire substrate and a deep-UV photodiode with a cut off wavelength of 229 nm that was fabricated on the Al0.75Ga0.25N template is presented. A responsivity of 0.53 A/W was attained corresponding to a detectivity of 1.64 × 1012 cmHz 1/2/W at a 50 V bias and 222 nm UV light illumination. The UV/VIS rejection ratio of seven orders of magnitude was achieved from the fabricated devices. The second work that was conducted in this thesis was the growth of a semiinsulating (SI-) GaN template. We also fabricated visible-blind photodetectors on this semi-insulating (SI-) GaN template. Furthermore, we fabricated identical samples on a regular GaN template in order to investigate any possible i improvement. The improvement found was obvious in terms of dark current. A dark current density of 1.96 × 10-10 A/cm2 at a 50 V bias voltage for an SI-GaN photodetector was obtained, which is four orders of magnitude lower than devices on a regular GaN template. Devices on an SI-GaN had very high detectivity, and therefore, SI-GaN was used for low level power detection. The photogenerated current was well above the dark current that was under the illumination of just a few picowatts of UV light.