HVPE Homoepitaxy of $β$-Ga$_2$O$_3$: High-Temperature Growth and Orientation-Dependent Surface Evolution

Abstract

In this work, we systematically investigate homoepitaxial $β$-Ga$_2$O$_3$ growth by halide vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) on (010), (001), and ($\bar{2}$01) native substrates over a broad growth parameter space, extending the growth temperature as high as 1150 $^\circ$C. The growth kinetics exhibit strong dependence on precursor supply, temperature, reactor pressure, and Ga-source-to-substrate distance. Increasing the HCl flow from 80 to 300 sccm enhances the growth rate by up to seven-fold, while increasing the temperature from 1050 to 1150 $^\circ$C nearly doubles the deposition rate. At 1150 $^\circ$C, atmospheric-pressure growth yields rates more than 2.5 times higher than those at 100 Torr, while reducing the O$_2$ flow to 5 sccm further increases the growth rate to 14.3 $μ$m/h, producing films up to 42.9 $μ$m thick in 3 h. Notably, phase-pure homoepitaxial layers with good crystalline quality are obtained across all three orientations, with low rocking-curve full width at half maximum (FWHM) values of 63.4, 66.6, and 42.8 arcsec for the (010), (001), and ($\bar{2}$01) epilayers, respectively. The surface morphology exhibits a pronounced crystallographic dependence and evolves strongly with the HVPE growth conditions. In particular, the ($\bar{2}$01) surface develops well-defined step-and-terrace morphology with local RMS roughness as low as 0.17 nm. These results extend $β$-Ga$_2$O$_3$ HVPE homoepitaxy into a higher-temperature regime and demonstrate a broad process window for high-rate growth of thick, high-quality epilayers with strongly orientation-dependent surface evolution.