IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Semiconductors Monday Sessions
       Session SC-MoM

Invited Paper SC-MoM1
III-N-V: A Novel Class of Compound Semiconductors for Electronic and Photonic Applications

Monday, October 29, 2001, 9:40 am, Room 124

Session: Band-Engineered Electronic Materials
Presenter: C.W. Tu, University of California, San Diego
Correspondent: Click to Email
Recently there is much interest in III-N-V compound semiconductors, because only a small amount of nitrogen incorporation (less than 5%) in conventional GaAs- and InP-based III-V compounds results in very large bandgap bowing, which is mainly from the downward movement of the conduction band edge. We demonstrated that InNAsP/GaInAsP single-quantum-well microdisk lasers exhibit a large characteristic temperature, as a result of a large conduction band discontinuity and electron confinement in the quantum well. An application of more interest is using GaInNAs/GaAs heterostructures on GaAs substrates for 1.3 micron edge-emitting and vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), utilizing the well developed GaAs/AlAs distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). We demonstrated even longer wavelength (1.5 micron) room-temperature photoluminescence (PL) from self-assembled GaInNAs QDs. We have also utilized the low-bandgap GaInNAs as the base of a heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT), which exhibits a 0.4 V reduction in the turn-on voltage for low-power applications. Besides bandgap bowing, incorporating nitrogen in GaP also results in a change in the band structure. We have demonstrated that with only 0.5% nitrogen, the Ga(N)P bandgap changes from being indirect to direct, with strong PL emission in the red (650 nm). We have fabricated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from GaNP/GaP heterostructures grown with one-step epitaxy, which is simpler than the commercial process of GaAs substrate removal and wafer bonding to a transparent GaP substrate for high-brightness AlInGaP LEDs. We are also exploring GaInNP on GaAs for HBT applications because of near-zero conduction band offset.