Taking Ga₂O₃ to the next level

Agnitron’s MOCVD reactors are underpinning tremendous advances in the material quality of Ga₂O₃, as well as leaps in the performance of various power devices made from this ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor.

BY FIKADU ALEMA, AARON FINE AND ANDREI OSINSKY FROM AGNITRON, ARKKA BHATTACHARYYA AND SRIRAM KRISHNAMOORTHY FROM UCSB, AND CAMERON GORSAK AND HARI P. NAIR FROM CORNELL UNIVERSITY

On the back of continuous rapid strides, Ga₂O₃ devices are poised to shape the future of the power semiconductor market. This ultra-wide bandgap material has all the key characteristics necessary to produce better devices and, at the same time, the potential for cost-competitiveness, thanks to the capability to make high-quality melt-grown bulk substrates.

It is now a decade since device and materials research into Ga₂O₃ began in earnest. Over that time tremendous progress has been made, in terms of both the quality of the epitaxial material and the performance of Ga₂O₃ diodes and transistors. Recent reports include β-Ga₂O₃-based devices with a breakdown voltage over 8 kV and critical breakdown fields beyond 5 MV/cm, a regime that exceeds the theoretical limits of SiC and GaN. Such success establishes β-Ga₂O₃ as the most promising candidate for next-generation solid-state power-switching applications.

Now is the time to build on all this progress and deliver further improvement to the quality of β-Ga₂O₃ epitaxial films, as progress on this front will open the door to practical power electronic devices that fully exploit the potential of this oxide. That’s the key message at the heart of this feature, which summarises the latest MOCVD process optimisation that has ensured high-quality materials and ultimately high-performance devices. It is clear that when β-Ga₂O₃ is grown by MOCVD using optimal process conditions, the resulting material is of unrivalled quality.