Single-crystalline high-quality beta-Ga2O3 pseudo-substrate on sapphire through sputtering for epitaxial deposition

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a method to produce high-quality, single-crystalline beta-Ga2O3 pseudo-substrates on sapphire using RF sputtering and annealing, enabling improved epitaxial growth for electronic applications.

Contribution

It introduces a solid-phase epitaxy process for beta-Ga2O3 on sapphire, achieving low roughness and high crystalline quality suitable for device fabrication.

Findings

High-quality beta-Ga2O3 pseudo-substrate achieved with low surface roughness.

Epitaxial N-doped Ga2O3 films exhibit reasonable electronic mobility.

The process enables beta-Ga2O3 growth on foreign substrates for advanced electronics.

Abstract

Solid-phase epitaxy (SPE) of beta-Ga2O3 thin films by radio-frequency (RF) sputtering and then crystallized through high-temperature post-deposition annealing is employed on sapphire substrates, yielding a high-quality pseudo-substrate for subsequent buffer growth via MOCVD and LPCVD. Low roughness (<0.5 nm) and sharp single-crystalline diffraction peaks corresponding to the (-201), (-402), and (-603) reflections of beta-Ga2O3 were observed in the SPE beta-Ga2O3 film and the subsequent epitaxial buffer layer. N-doped Ga2O3 film on SPE Ga2O3 film grown by LPCVD showed step-assisted growth mode with reasonable electronic behavior with 45 cm^2/V-s mobility at a bulk carrier concentration of 1.3e17 cm^-3. These results suggest that SPE Ga2O3 is a promising pathway to advance the development of beta-Ga2O3 on foreign substrates.