Nearly 4-inch-diameter free-standing GaN wafer fabricated by hydride vapor phase epitaxy with pit-inducing buffer layer

A free-standing GaN wafer was fabricated by depositing a GaN buffer that induced the formation of pits (hereafter, pit-inducing GaN buffer) on a low-temperature-grown GaN buffer on the sapphire substrate. A high-temperature-grown GaN layer was grown on the pit-inducing GaN buffer that induced the formation of pits on the high-temperature-grown GaN layer. The pit-inducing buffer suppresses crack formation in the thick GaN film thereby releasing growth stress. Thermal stress in GaN on a sapphire system is also discussed on the basis of calculations utilizing a bilayer model. We have succeeded in the fabrication of a nearly 4-in.-diameter free-standing GaN thick wafer with a pit-inducing GaN buffer by one-stop hydride vapor phase epitaxy, which will lead to a low-cost fabrication of free-standing GaN wafers.