Annealing for Tailoring Au/GaN Schottky-Barrier Height

Annealing has been found to be an effective means of tailoring the height of a Schottky barrier between gold and gallium nitride. This finding offers promise for the development of improved metal contacts on GaN semiconductors. Heretofore, the commercialization of GaN semiconductor devices has been impeded by difficulties of fabrication and by nonreproducibility of the Schottky-barrier heights and other properties of the metal/GaN interfaces. Now it appears that annealing may be the key to making GaN devices with smaller unit-tounit variations of contact properties and, in particular, tailorability of Schottky-barrier heights over a wide energy range.