《Dry-etch damage and its recovery in InGaNGaN multi-quantum-well light-emitting diodes》.pdf

INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS PUBLISHING SEMICONDUCTOR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Semicond. Sci. Technol. 18 (2003) 530–534 PII: S0268-1242(03)58632-1 Dry-etch damage and its recovery in InGaN/GaN multi-quantum-well light-emitting diodes 1 2 3 4 Ji-Myon Lee , Chul Huh , Dong-Joon Kim and Seong-Ju Park 1 Basic Research Laboratory, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon 305-350, Korea 2 Department of Electrical Computer Engineering, Cornell University, NY 14853, USA 3 Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Suwon 442-743, Korea 4 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Kwangju 500-712, Korea E-mail: jimlee@etri.re.kr Received 21 January 2003, in final form 21 March 2003 Published 28 April 2003 Online at stacks.iop.org/SST/18/530 Abstract Etch-induced damage in GaN/InGaN multi-quantum well light-emitting diodes (LEDs) caused by a Cl2-base plasma and its recovery by means of a N2-plasma and annealing process of n-GaN is described. The photoluminescence intensity of etched n-type GaN was decreased by several orders of magnitude due to etch-induced damage, giving rise to an increase in the leakage current in LED current–voltage curves. However, treatment of the LEDs with a N2 plasma along with a rapid thermal annealing process led to an enhancement in the I– V characteristics of the LEDs due to the suppression of the leakage current. The electroluminescence intensity of LEDs which was etched at dc bias of −200 V was also improved by a factor of two relative to the as-etched LEDs, as a result of this treatment. 1. Introduction group III and nitrogen, accompanying etch-induced damage