Growth of AlGaN on silicon substrates: A novel way to make back-illuminated ultraviolet photodetectors

AlGaN, with its tunable wide-bandgap is a good choice for the realization of ultraviolet photodetectors. AlGaN films tend to be grown on foreign substrates such as sapphire, which is the most common choice for back-illuminated devices. However, even ultraviolet opaque substrates like silicon holds promise because, silicon can be removed by chemical treatment to allow back-illumination,1 and it is a very low-cost substrate which is available in large diameters up to 300 mm. However, Implementation of silicon as the solar-blind PD substrates requires overcoming the lattice-mismatch (17%) with the AlxGa1-xN that leads to high density of dislocation and crack-initiating stress. In this talk, we report the growth of thick crack-free AlGaN films on (111) silicon substrates through the use of a substrate patterning and mask-less selective area regrowth. This technique is critical as it decouples the epilayers and the substrate and allows for crack-free growth; however, the masking also helps to reduce the dislocation density by inclining the growth direction and encouraging dislocations to annihilate. A back-illuminated p-i-n PD structure is subsequently grown on this high quality template layer. After processing and hybridizing the device we use a chemical process to selectively remove the silicon substrate. This removal has minimal effect on the device, but it removes the UV-opaque silicon and allows back-illumination of the photodetector. We report our latest results of back-illuminated solar-blind photodetectors growth on silicon.