Two-dimensional buffer breaks substrate limit in III-nitrides epitaxy
- Yimeng Sang
- Xiangming Xu
- Ying Wu
- Guanqun Feng
- Xu Zhang
- Fulin Zhuo
- Zhengxian Jin
- Hui Guo
- Tao Tao
- Sun’an Ding
- Xuefeng Wang
- Dunjun Chen
- Kazuhiro Ohkawa
- Kun Xing
- Xinran Wang
- Zhe Zhuang
- Rong Zhang
- Husam N. Alshareef
- Bin Liu
2025-07-23
Expanding the diversity of substrate materials for the growth of single-crystalline films enables the heterointegration of electronic and optoelectronic devices in modern semiconductor industry. However, the substrate materials are restricted to those having matched single-crystalline lattices with the epilayers, thereby making the use of non-single-crystalline substrates infeasible. Here, we report an epitaxy strategy for the wafer-scale growth of high-quality single-crystalline gallium nitride (GaN) on an amorphous silicon dioxide (SiO 2 ) substrate. We achieve this result through a chemical bond transition, converting multilayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS 2 ) to molybdenum nitride (MoN), which serves as a buffer layer to engineer a preferred orientation for the epitaxy of the overlying GaN film. Using this method, we also demonstrate the growth of an AlGaN/AlN/GaN heterostructure with high electron mobility exceeding 2000 square centimeters per volt per second. The resultant high-electron-mobility transistors exhibit subthreshold swing, on/off ratio, and threshold voltage comparable to those commercial devices.