Hydrogen in GaN-experiments

Hydrogen is an important component of the gas phase growth chemistry for CaN (eg. NH3, (CH3)(3) Ga) and the processing environment for subsequent device fabrication (eg. SiH4 for dielectric deposition, NH3 or H-2 annealing ambients), and is found to readily permeate into heteroepitaxial material at temperatures less than or equal to 200C. Its main effect has been the passivation of Mg accepters in p-GaN through formation of neutral Mg-H complexes,which can be dissociated through minority-carrier (electron) injection or simple thermal annealing. Atomic hydrogen is also found to passivate a variety of other species in GaN, as detected by a change in the electrical or optical properties of the material. An example is the increase in luminescence efficiency of Er3+ ions in AlN after hydrogenation, through passivation of non-radiative states that would be an alternative path for de-excitation. The injection of hydrogen during a large variety of device fabrication steps has been detected by SIMS profiling using H-2 isotopic labeling. Basically all of the acceptor species in GaN, namely Mg, C, Ca and Cd are found to form complexes with hydrogen.