Investigation of gap states near conduction band edge in vicinity of interface between Mg-ion-implanted GaN and Al2O3 deposited after ultra-high-pressure annealing

Abstract The gap states near the conduction band edge ( E C ) in the vicinity of the interface between Mg-ion-implanted GaN and Al 2 O 3 deposited after post-implantation annealing were investigated in the range between E C – 0.15 eV and E C – 0.45 eV. For this purpose, capacitance–voltage measurements were performed on MOS diodes with the n -type conduction of Mg-implanted GaN maintained by suppressing the dose. Although the gap state density D T was reduced for the sample prepared with the dose of 1.5 × 10 12 cm –2 by conventional rapid thermal annealing (RTA) at 1250 °C for 1 min using an AlN protective cap layer, further improvement was achieved by capless ultra-high-pressure annealing (UHPA) at the same temperature for the same duration. Furthermore, the D T distributions for the samples with capless UHPA at 1400 °C for 5 min are comparable to that for the sample with conventional RTA at 1250 °C for 1 min using the cap layer.