High <i>n</i>-type conductivity and carrier concentration in Si-implanted homoepitaxial AlN
M. Hayden Breckenridge, Pegah Bagheri, Qiang Guo, Biplab Sarkar, Dolar Khachariya, Spyridon Pavlidis, James Tweedie, Ronny Kirste, Seiji Mita, Pramod Reddy, Ramón Collazo, Zlatko Sitar
Abstract
We demonstrate Si-implanted AlN with high conductivity (&gt;1 Ω−1 cm−1) and high carrier concentration (5 × 1018 cm−3). This was enabled by Si implantation into AlN with a low threading dislocation density (TDD) (&lt;103 cm−2), a non-equilibrium damage recovery and dopant activation annealing process, and in situ suppression of self-compensation during the annealing. Low TDD and active suppression of VAl-nSiAl complexes via defect quasi Fermi level control enabled low compensation, while low-temperature, non-equilibrium annealing maintained the desired shallow donor state with an ionization energy of ∼70 meV. The realized n-type conductivity and carrier concentration are over one order of magnitude higher than that reported thus far and present a major technological breakthrough in doping of AlN.