β-Ga2O3 has become the focus of considerable attention as an ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor following the successful development of bulk single crystals using the melt growth method. Accordingly, homoepitaxy studies, where the interface between the substrate and the epilayer is not problematic, have become mainstream and many results have been published. However, because the cost of homo-substrates is high, research is still mainly at the laboratory level and has not yet been scaled up to commercialization. To overcome this problem, many researchers are trying to grow high quality Ga2O3 epilayers on hetero-substrates. We used diluted SiH4 gas to control the doping concentration during the heteroepitaxial growth of β-Ga2O3 on c-plane sapphire using metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Despite the high level of defect density inside the grown β-Ga2O3 epilayer due to the aggregation of random rotated domains, the carrier concentration could be controlled from 1 × 1019 to 1 × 1016 cm-3 by diluting the SiH4 gas concentration. This study indicates that β-Ga2O3 hetero-epitaxy has similar potential to homo-epitaxy and is expected to accelerate the commercialization of β-Ga2O3 applications with the advantage of low substrate cost.

In this research, a precipitation method was used to synthesize β-Ga2O3 powders with various particle morphologies and sizes under varying precipitation conditions, such as gallium nitrate concentration, pH, and aging temperature, using ammonium hydroxide and ammonium carbonate as precipitants. The obtained powders were characterized in detail by XRD, SEM, FT-IR, and TG-DSC. From the TG-DSC result, GaOOH phase was transformed to β-Ga2O3 at around 742˚C, and weight loss percent was about 14 % when NH4OH was used as a precipitant. Also, β-Ga2O3 formed at 749˚C and weight loss percent was about 15 % when (NH)2CO3 was used as a precipitant. XRD results showed that the obtained Ga2O3 had pure monoclinic phase in both cases. When (NH)2CO3 was used as a precipitant, the particle shape changed and became irregular. The range of particle size was about 500nm-4μm based on various concentrations of gallium nitrate solution with NH4OH. The particle size was increased from 1-2μm to 3-4μm and particle shape was changed from spherical to bar type by increasing aging temperature over 80˚C.