Evaluation of metal/indium-tin-oxide for transparent low-resistance contacts to p-type GaN Wenting Hou, Christoph Stark, Shi You, Liang Zhao, Theeradetch Detchprohm, and Christian Wetzel* Future Chips Constellation and Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA *Corresponding author:
[email protected] Received 12 March 2012; revised 27 June 2012; accepted 8 July 2012; posted 16 July 2012 (Doc. ID 164558); published 2 August 2012 In search of a better transparent contact to p-GaN, we analyze various metal/indium-tin-oxide (ITO) (Ag/ITO, AgCu/ITO, Ni/ITO, and NiZn/ITO) contact schemes and compare to Ni/Au, NiZn/Ag, and ITO. The metal layer boosts conductivity while the ITO thickness can be adjusted to constructive trans- mission interference on GaN that exceeds extraction from bare GaN. We find a best compromise for an Ag/ITO (3 nm ∕ 67 nm) ohmic contact with a relative transmittance of 97% of the bare GaN near 530 nm and a specific contact resistance of 0.03 Ω ·cm2. The contact proves suitable for green light-emitting diodes in epi-up geometry. © 2012 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 230.3670, 310.7005. 1. Introduction While contact resistance and current spreading Our society’s drive for energy efficiency places high are known to improve with increasing thickness of relevance on the identification of low-resistance the metal stack, the transmittance decreases. For ohmic contacts to wide bandgap group-III nitrides p-type GaN, semitransparent Ni/Au contacts are most commonly used. Reported specific contact for use in light-emitting diodes [1,2] (LEDs) and −3 third-generation solar cells [3].