Shallow Si donor in ion-implanted homoepitaxial AlN
M. Hayden Breckenridge, Qiang Guo, Andrew Klump, Biplab Sarkar, Yan Guan, James Tweedie, Ronny Kirste, Seiji Mita, Pramod Reddy, Ramón Collazo, Zlatko Sitar
Abstract
We demonstrate Si as a shallow donor in aluminum nitride (AlN) with an ionization energy of ∼70 meV. The shallow state was achieved by ion implantation of Si into homoepitaxial AlN and a low thermal budget damage recovery and activation process. These results demonstrate that the DX formation may be a kinetically limited process, though being a non-equilibrium process, preventing the Si donor from relaxing to the deep donor state. The room temperature conductivity was measured to be ∼0.05 Ω−1 cm−1, which is one order of magnitude higher than what has been reported for the epitaxially doped or implanted AlN.