A study on room-temperature photoluminescence and crystallinity of RF-sputtered GaN for a cost-effective III-V-on-Si platform

Recently, Si technology has been searching for ways to develop Si-driven future electronics by overcoming the limitations in its electrical and optical properties through more Moore (MM), morethan- Moore (MtM), and beyond complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) approaches. Among the suggested strategies, III-V-on-Si heterogeneous integration can be a solution that allows the merger of III-V-based devices and Si CMOS logic blocks on Si monolithically and costeffectively. GaN has wide applicability owing to its high electron mobility and large energy bandgap for high-speed low-power transistors and visible light sources. In this work, the room-temperature photoluminescence (PL) characteristics and the crystallinity of GaN-on-Si were empirically studied. GaN was deposited by using RF sputtering on p-type Si substrates. The results show that the peak location near 520 nm does not vary with the wavelength of the excitation laser, which is strongly supported by the fact that the signals are not from higher-order harmonics but are genuinely from the prepared GaN. Further, a sharp peak is observed in the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis cooperatively performed with PL experiments. Consequently, partially-crystallized GaN has been obtained on Si by using conventional CMOS processing with a low thermal budget and high cost-effectiveness.