Effects of nitrogen flux and RF sputtering power on the preparation of crystalline a-plane AlN films on r-plane sapphire substrates

A-plane aluminum nitride (AlN) with high quality is crucial to fabricate high-performance non-polar deep-ultraviolet optoelectronic devices. In this work, we prepared crystalline a-plane AlN films on r-plane sapphire substrates by combining reactive magnetron sputtering and high temperature annealing (HTA). The effects of N-2 flux and radio frequency (RF) sputtering power on the crystal quality, the surface morphology and the in-plane stress state of a-plane AlN films were comprehensively investigated. The results suggest that the properties of high temperature annealed a-plane AlN (HTA-AlN) films positively depend on the initial states of the sputtered AlN (SP-AlN) films. Increasing the N-2 flux or the RF sputtering power can improve the crystalline quality of SP-AlN films by reducing the kinetic energy of deposited particles, which facilitates a-plane AlN deposition. A higher N-2 flux smoothens the surface morphology due to the relieved bombardment effect, which is confirmed by the enlarged in-plane tensile stress state. However, a higher sputtering power leads to a rougher surface because of the accelerated deposition rate. With optimized sputtering parameters, a high-quality a-plane HTA-AlN template was obtained with full width at half maximum values of (11-20) plane x-ray rocking curves as low as 1188 and 1224 arcsec along [0001] and [1-100] directions, respectively. The surface presents an ordered stripe-like morphology with a root-mean-square value of 0.79 nm. Our work provides a convenient and effective strategy to prepare high quality a-plane AlN templates and accelerate the versatile application of non-polar deep-ultraviolet light-emitting diode devices.