Quasi-Epitaxial Growth of β-Ga2O3-Coated Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Tape for Flexible UV Photodetectors

Xiao Tang; Kuang-Hui Li; Yue Zhao; Yanxin Sui; Huili Liang; Zeng Liu; Che-Hao Liao; Wedyan Babatain; Rongyu Lin; Chuanju Wang; Yi Lu; Feras S Alqatari; Zengxia Mei; Weihua Tang; Xiaohang Li

doi:10.1021/acsami.1c15560

Quasi-Epitaxial Growth of β-Ga₂O₃-Coated Wide Band Gap Semiconductor Tape for Flexible UV Photodetectors

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2022 Jan 12;14(1):1304-1314. doi: 10.1021/acsami.1c15560. Epub 2021 Dec 22.

Authors

Xiao Tang¹, Kuang-Hui Li¹, Yue Zhao², Yanxin Sui³, Huili Liang³, Zeng Liu⁴, Che-Hao Liao¹, Wedyan Babatain⁵, Rongyu Lin¹, Chuanju Wang¹, Yi Lu¹, Feras S Alqatari¹, Zengxia Mei³, Weihua Tang⁴, Xiaohang Li¹

Affiliations

¹ Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia.
² School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240, Shanghai, China.
³ Key Laboratory for Renewable Energy, Beijing Key Laboratory for New Energy Materials and Devices, Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
⁴ Laboratory of Information Functional Materials and Devices, School of Science and State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.
⁵ King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), MMH Labs, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia.

PMID: 34936328
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c15560

Abstract

The epitaxial growth of technically important β-Ga₂O₃ semiconductor thin films has not been realized on flexible substrates due to the limitations of high-temperature crystallization conditions and lattice-matching requirements. We demonstrate the epitaxial growth of β-Ga₂O₃(-201) thin films on flexible CeO₂(001)-buffered Hastelloy tape. The results indicate that CeO₂(001) has a small bi-axial lattice mismatch with β-Ga₂O₃(-201), inducing simultaneous double-domain epitaxial growth. Flexible photodetectors are fabricated on the epitaxial β-Ga₂O₃-coated tape. Measurements reveal that the photodetectors have a responsivity of 4 × 10⁴ mA/W, with an on/off ratio reaching 1000 under 254 nm incident light and 5 V bias voltage. Such a photoelectrical performance is within the mainstream level of β-Ga₂O₃-based photodetectors using conventional rigid single-crystal substrates. More importantly, it remained robust against more than 20,000 bending test cycles. Moreover, the technique paves the way for the direct in situ epitaxial growth of other flexible oxide semiconductor devices in the future.

Keywords: Ga2O3; epitaxial growth; flexible; photodetector; semiconductor.