Sputtered-Growth of High-Temperature Seed-Layer assisted β-Ga2O3 thin film on Silicon-Substrate for Cost-Effective solar-blind photodetector application

Abstract

β-Ga2O3 thin films was grown on cost-effective p-Si(100) substrate by sputtering technique. The evolution of crystalline structure with growth parameters revealed that the gallium oxide thin film grown on the high-temperature seed layer and various optimised growth parameters like sputtering power, deposition pressure and pre-substrate annealing has been proved extremely beneficial in exhibiting excellent crystalline quality. However, the direct growth of β-Ga2O3 on Si substrate with seed-layer was found to be amorphous in nature. The discussion about the critical role of varied growth conditions were carried in detail. The photoresponse of the optimized device showed a photoresponsivity of 95.64 AW−1 and a corresponding quantum efficiency of 4.73 × 104 % at moderate bias under 250 nm illumination which is higher than most of the devices being reported on planar β-Ga2O3 solar-blind photodetectors deposited on high cost substrates. Moreover, the device showed the high transient response at moderate as well as at self-bias mode with good reproducibility and stability. The rise and decay time of the photodetector at self-powered mode was found to be in millisecond (58.3 ms/34.7 ms). This work paves the alternative way towards the fabrication of β-Ga2O3 solar-blind photodetector on cost-effective substrate and compatible with mature Si technology. © 2020 The Author(s). Published on behalf of The Electrochemical Society by IOP Publishing Limited. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 License (CC BYNC-ND, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is not changed in any way and is properly cited. For permission for commercial reuse