Effects of substrate quality and orientation on the characteristics of III-nitride resonant tunneling diodes

Al(Ga)N/GaN resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) are grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. The effects of material quality on room temperature negative differential resistance (NDR) behaviour of RTDs are investigated by growing the RTD structure on AlN, GaN, and lateral epitaxial overgrowth GaN templates. This reveals that NDR characteristics of RTDs are very sensitive to material quality (such as surface roughness and dislocations density). The effects of the aluminum content of AlGaN double barriers (DB) and polarization fields on NDR characteristic of AlGaN/GaN RTDs were also investigated by employing low dislocation density c-plane (polar) and m-plane (nonpolar) freestanding GaN substrates. Lower aluminum content in the DB RTD active layer and minimization of dislocations and polarization fields enabled a more reliable and reproducible NDR behaviour at room temperature.