Bandgap engineering in III-nitrides with boron and group V elements: Toward applications in ultraviolet emitters

Abstract

A key material system for opto- and high-power electronics are III-nitrides. Their functionality can be expanded when bandgap engineering is extended beyond common materials such as AlN, GaN, and InN. Combining these three compounds with boron nitride and other III–V compounds (GaP, GaAs, GaSb, InP, etc.) is an intuitive method of expanding bandgap engineering in semiconductor devices. This may allow improvement of current devices for which performances are limited by the intrinsic properties of common III-nitride alloys, as well as the creation of novel devices. A comprehensive review of this activity is presented in this article, including an up-to-date compilation of material parameters for wurtzite boron nitride; its alloying with other III-nitrides, including structural and optical characterization; the band anticrossing model for III-nitrides diluted with group V atoms; their synthesis and structural and optical characterization; and examples of applications of III-nitrides containing boron and group V atoms in semiconductor devices. It is shown to be very beneficial for ultraviolet emitters to incorporate alloying of III-nitrides with BN, as these compounds have lattice constants much smaller than that of AlN, offering unique possibilities in strain engineering. It is shown that the incorporation of P, As, Sb, and Bi in GaN is low when the material is deposited at this temperature, which is optimal for the host. Lowering the growth temperature significantly enhances the incorporation of isovalent dopants, but deteriorates the optical quality of the material. The obtained changes in the electronic band structure can be beneficial in many applications, including water splitting or shifting emission toward longer wavelengths.

Role of Temperature in Arsenic-Induced Antisurfactant Growth of GaN Microrods

“…Summarizing CL and PL measurements performed on GaN microrods grown at different temperatures, we can conclude that no emission, which could be attributed to GaNAs, that is, an emission at 2.8 eV, 40 , 48 is visible in these spectra. The observed spectra are typical for GaN.…”

“…The observed differences are attributed to the different concentrations of point defects and not the presence of arsenic inside the GaN rods because even a small amount of arsenic would have reduced the energy gap down to ∼2.8 eV. 40 , 48 The direct comparison of PL intensities for the three samples is difficult because of the different amounts of the material, which is excited in these measurements performed on microrods transferred onto sapphire substrates. Therefore, to compare the optical quality of the studied samples, the ratio of band gap-related emission ( I B ) and defect-related emission ( I D ) was analyzed ( Figure 6 d).…”

“…These growths were performed at an arbitrary chosen temperature of 800 °C, which is close to the optimal growth temperature of high-quality GaN layers. 40 At this high temperature and in Ga-rich conditions, arsenic shows antisurfactant properties and is not built into the GaN matrix. Since temperature is known to have an impact on growth parameters in MBE, further studies in a wide temperature range are needed and would be interesting to perform.…”

Material Gain in Polar GaInN and AlGaN Quantum Wells: How to Overcome the ‘Dead’ Width for Light Emitters in These QW Systems?

“…Parameters of binary semiconductors used in our calculations are taken from the review paper on material parameters in III-N [64]. In recent years, some parameters have been updated [66] but they do not change much, so we decided to take the material parameters from one source for this study, with the exception of the parameters needed for the calculation of the polarization effects, which were carefully analyzed in Refs. [66,67] and are taken into our calculations from [67].…”

Atomistic origin of compositional pulling effect in wurtzite (B, Al, In)xGa1−xN: A first-principles study

“…[1][2][3] In the last few decades, a large number of more complicated multinary systems or alloys have been produced and have been utilized because of their physical properties. [4][5][6][7] Moreover, III-nitride multinary alloys have become promising candidate materials for deep ultraviolet (DUV) to near-infrared (NIR) applications by just varying the composition of the group III elements. Optical devices such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes (LDs) have then been realized owing to the intrinsic characteristics of III-nitride semiconductors.…”