Activation kinetics of implanted Si+ in GaN and application to fabricating lateral Schottky diodes

The electrical activation characteristics of implanted Si+ in GaN were investigated as a function of annealing temperature (1000 °C–1200 °C). The maximum activation percentage for an ion dose of 2.5×1014 cm−2 was ∼30% with an apparent activation energy for electrical activation of 1.65±0.15 eV obtained from the temperature dependence of the saturated carrier density. Lateral Schottky diodes fabricated on this material showed forward ideality factors of ∼2 and a temperature coefficient of −0.15 V K−1 for their reverse breakdown voltage. These results show the feasibility of creating n+ tubs in p-GaN such as are needed as sources of minority carriers to achieve inversion in GaN metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors.