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Tilt angles of threading dislocations (TDs) which induce leakage of current on SiC junction barrier schottky diodes (SiC-JBSs) were investigated by two-photon-excited photoluminescence (2PPL) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Observation of leakage spots measured by atomic force microscopy (AFM) revealed that pit-like structures were certainly formed but the depths were considerably shallow, indicating that influence of local electric field due to the structures was negligible on our SiC-JBSs. It became clear that tilt angles of the TDs inducing leakage were relatively larger than about 11° by 2PPL and that the TD was the threading mixed dislocation by TEM.

Shifts in the spatial distribution of threading dislocations in 150 mm 4H SiC wafers were examined as a response to intentional changes in both the flow of the nitrogen source gas used to control resistivity during bulk crystal growth, and the growth rate. The density of threading edge and screw dislocations was found to be more evenly distributed in wafers produced under a high-growth rate, low-resistivity process. This result corresponded to a flattening of the resistivity distribution, and a ~34% reduction in on-and off-facet resistivity differential. The effect was attributed to regularized 4H island coalescence due to modulation of step terrace width.

Si-based group III-V material enables a multitude of applications and functionalities of the novel optoelectronic integration chips (OEICs) owing to their excellent optoelectronic properties and compatibility with the mature Si CMOS process technology. To achieve high performance OEICs, the crystal quality of the group III-V epitaxial layer plays an extremely vital role. However, there are several challenges for high quality group III-V material growth on Si, such as a large lattice mismatch, highly thermal expansion coefficient difference, and huge dissimilarity between group III-V material and Si, which inevitably leads to the formation of high threading dislocation densities (TDDs) and anti-phase boundaries (APBs). In view of the above-mentioned growth problems, this review details the defects formation and defects suppression methods to grow III-V materials on Si substrate (such as GaAs and InP), so as to give readers a full understanding on the group III-V hetero-epitaxial growth on Si substrates. Based on the previous literature investigation, two main concepts (global growth and selective epitaxial growth (SEG)) were proposed. Besides, we highlight the advanced technologies, such as the miscut substrate, multi-type buffer layer, strain superlattice (SLs), and epitaxial lateral overgrowth (ELO), to decrease the TDDs and APBs. To achieve high performance OEICs, the growth strategy and development trend for group III-V material on Si platform were also emphasized.

Heteroepitaxy of GaAs on Si enables well-functioning III–V semiconductor lasers integrated onto silicon, solving the issue of lacking purely silicon-based light sources. Since GaAs has been the key material in many III–V laser structures, the Si-based GaAs epilayer should be of high quality which requires a low surface roughness and dislocation density. Herein, we demonstrate a high-quality heteroepitaxy of 1.84 μm GaAs on Si (001) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. By virtue of multi-time thermal cycle annealing, the surface roughness was reduced to 1.74 nm within a scan area of 10 × 10 μm 2 , and the measured threading dislocation density was as low as 6.87 × 10 6 /cm 2 . Periodic interfacial misfit dislocation arrays were found at the GaAs/Si interface with a misfit-dislocation-spacing distance of 9.6 nm. The formation of these arrays is attributed to the usage of thermal cycle annealing which makes near-interface TDs form into in-plane misfit dislocations. The demonstrated epitaxy scheme of growing such high-quality GaAs/Si virtual substrates provides a feasible way to fabricate III–V semiconductor lasers with enhanced performances.

A patterned Si substrate is used to reduce the threading dislocation density (TDD) in a Ge epitaxial film for near-infrared photonic device applications. Using photolithography and dry etching, an array of submicron-wide strips with a rectangular cross-section is patterned in the [110] direction of a Si (001) wafer. A Ge film as thick as 1 µm is grown on the patterned Si by chemical vapor deposition with an ordinary two-step growth method, where a buffer layer of pure Ge as thin as 50 nm is grown at a low temperature of 370°C, followed by growth at an elevated temperature of 700°C. A Ge film is formed with a reasonably flat surface despite the non-flat starting Si surface as well as the large lattice mismatch of 4.2% between Ge and Si. The etch-pit density measurements for the Ge film exhibits TDD of about 6 × 107 cm–2, which is significantly lower than that of about 2 × 108 cm–2 for the film on the unpatterned region prepared on the same Si substrate. The TDD reduction is attributed to a trapping of the dislocations in the trench regions between the Si strips, as observed in cross-sectional transmission electron microscope images.

In this work, the origin of the dielectric breakdown of 4H-SiC power MOSFETs was studied at the nanoscale, analyzing devices that failed after extremely long (three months) of high temperature reverse bias (HTRB) stress. A one-to-one correspondence between the location of the breakdown event and a threading dislocation propagating through the epitaxial layer was found. Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) revealed the conductive nature of the threading dislocation and a local modification of the minority carriers concentration. Basing on these results, the role of the threading dislocation on the failure of 4H-SiC MOSFETs could be clarified.

In spite of great application potential as transparent n-type oxides with high electrical mobility at room temperature, threading dislocations (TDs) often found in the (Ba,La)SnO3 (BLSO) films can limit their intrinsic properties so that their role in the physical properties of BLSO films need to be properly understood. The electrical properties and electronic structure of BLSO films grown on SrTiO3 (001) (STO) and BaSnO3 (001) (BSO) substrates are comparatively studied to investigate the effect of the TDs. In the BLSO/STO films with TD density of ~1.32 × 1011 cm−2, n-type carrier density ne and electron mobility are significantly reduced, as compared with the BLSO/BSO films with nearly no TDs. This indicates that TDs play the role of scattering-centers as well as acceptor-centers to reduce n-type carriers. Moreover, in the BLSO/STO films, both binding energies of an Sn 3d core level and a valence band maximum are reduced, being qualitatively consistent with the Fermi level shift with the reduced n-type carriers. However, the reduced binding energies of the Sn 3d core level and the valence band maximum are clearly different as 0.39 and 0.19 eV, respectively, suggesting that the band gap renormalization preexisting in proportion to ne is further suppressed to restore the band gap in the BLSO/STO films with the TDs.

We evaluated crystalline quality of SiC p/n column layers over 20 μm thickness formed by trench-filling-epitaxial growth. Although threading dislocation density of trench-filling-epitaxial layer is almost same as flat n-type epitaxial layer, threading dislocations are localized in only trench-filled p-columns. We consider that threading dislocations migrated toward p-columns around trench bottom during trench-filling-epitaxial growth.

We investigated the relation between the nucleation of dislocations and the lattice misfits by nitrogen concentration difference between seed and grown crystal during the initial stage of growth. 4H-SiC single crystals were grown with various nitrogen gas flow rates introduced into the crystal growing chamber under the same temperature and pressure to minimize the effect of thermal stress on the nucleation of dislocations. The nitrogen atomic concentrations of grown crystals depended on the introduced nitrogen gas ratios and they highly increased at the very early stage of growth. The generation of new threading dislocations at the interface also was affected by the nitrogen atomic concentrations differences between seed and grown crystals. Very few generated threading dislocations were observed in low nitrogen atomic concentration samples, however nucleation of threading dislocations at the interface were found in high nitrogen atomic concentrations samples. At initial stages of PVT growth process, the generation of threading dislocations induced by lattice misfits originated from nitrogen concentration difference between seed and grown crystals were investigated and found the appropriate nitrogen gas flow rates and profile at the heating and depressurized stage.

The refractive index of AlN has a direct influence on AlGaN-based deep ultraviolet optoelectronic devices, such as the external quantum efficiency of light-emitting devices. Revealing the dependence of the refractive index of AlN on the threading dislocations is meaningful since high-density threading dislocations usually exist in AlN. In this paper, the effect of different dislocation densities on the refractive index of AlN is investigated. With the increase of dislocation densities from 4.24 × 10 8 to 3.48 × 10 9  cm − 2 , the refractive index of AlN decreases from 2.2508 to 2.2102 at 280 nm. Further study demonstrates that the nanoscale strain field around dislocations changes the propagation of light and thus decreases the refractive index of AlN. This study will be beneficial to the design of optoelectronic devices and thus realizing high-performance deep ultraviolet optoelectronic devices.