A study on Ohmic contact to dry-etched p-GaN

Low-power dry-etching process has been adopted to study the influence of dry-etching on Ohmic contact to p-GaN. When the surface layer of as-grown p-GaN was removed by low-power SiCl4/Cl-2-etching, no Ohmic contact can be formed on the low-power dry-etched p-GaN. The same dry-etching process was also applied on n-GaN to understand the influence of the low-power dry-etching process. By capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurement, the Schottky barrier heights (SBHs) of p-GaN and n-GaN were measured. By comparing the change of measured SBHs on p-GaN and n-GaN, it was suggested that etching damage is not the only reason responsible for the degraded Ohmic contacts to dry-etched p-GaN and for Ohmic contact formatin, the original surface layer of as-grown p-GaN have some special properties, which were removed by dry-etching process. To partially recover the original surface of as-grown p-GaN, high temperature annealing (1000 degrees C 30 s) was tried on the SiCl4/Cl-2-etched p-GaN and Ohmic contact was obtained.