Scalable Solar-Blind Imaging Enabled by Single-Crystalline Beta-Ga2O3 Membranes on Silicon Backplanes

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel membrane-based integration platform using single-crystalline beta-Ga2O3 for scalable, high-resolution solar-blind UV imaging on silicon backplanes, overcoming material and system-level constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a membrane assembly strategy that enables high-resolution UV detector arrays on silicon, improving system speed and compatibility with existing electronics.

Findings

Wafer-scale freestanding beta-Ga2O3 membranes achieved

High-speed, non-persistent UV photodiodes demonstrated

Uniform solar-blind imaging arrays without lag

Abstract

Ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors are attractive for solar-blind ultraviolet (UV) detection owing to their intrinsically low noise and high spectral selectivity, yet their deployment in large-area, high-density electronic imaging systems remains limited by a fundamental trade-off between material quality, device speed, and compatibility with high-density planar silicon readout circuits. Here, we report a membrane-enabled integration platform based on transferable single-crystalline beta-Ga2O3 that overcomes these constraints at the system level. By exploiting the weak interplanar bonding of beta-Ga2O3 (100) plane, we obtain wafer-scale freestanding single-crystalline membranes that enable vertically integrated photodiodes with sub-microsecond, non-persistent photoresponse and high UV-visible rejection. Crucially, we introduce a stitching-based membrane assembly strategy that decouples array resolution from the size of the source single-crystalline substrate, allowing high-resolution photodetector arrays to be integrated onto silicon thin-film-transistor backplanes. The modular assembled active-matrix UV imaging arrays exhibit uniform solar-blind response without image lag, in stark contrast to arrays based on amorphous or polycrystalline films. Beyond beta-Ga2O3, this membrane-enabled and stitching-based modular integration strategy provides a general route toward high-speed, high-resolution electronic imaging systems using transferable single-crystalline semiconductors.