High temperature chemical vapor deposition of aluminum nitride, growth and evaluation

The application of AlN films in optoelectronics, sensors and high temperature coatings is strongly dependent on the nano-micro-structure of the film, impurity level and defect density. AlN epitaxial thin (0.5-10 μm) and thick polycrystalline (> 10 μm) films were grown on different foreign substrates (sapphire, silicon carbide, graphite) and single AlN crystals by Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD), also called Hydride Vapor Phase Epitaxy (HVPE), at high temperature (1200-1750 °C). In the first part of this paper, polycrystalline growth of thick films (> 10 μm) prepared at high growth rate (> 100 μm·h− 1) was performed on graphite substrates to study the preferential orientation of the films. AlN/W multilayers were deposited on silicon carbide composites to increase their performance at high temperature in aggressive conditions. Such multilayer materials can be used for the cladding of nuclear fuel. The second part of this paper concerns the characterization of epitaxial films, including their crystalline state, surface morphology, and inherent and thermally induced stress which inevitably leads to high defect densities and even cracking. The full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of X-ray rocking curves of the grown AlN layers exhibited very large values (several thousand arcsec), and they became steeply deteriorated with increasing growth rate. To improve the crystalline quality of AlN layer, well-known growth techniques, such as multi-step growth using buffer layers, were used at temperatures above 1200 °C in order to lower the disorientation to 300 arcsec. The applications of such “templates” for deep UV light emitting diodes (UV LED) and surface acoustic wave sensors (SAW) are discussed.