Gallium nitride is a wide-bandgap III-V semiconductor with a hard wurtzite crystal structure and a 3.4 electron-volt band gap, letting it switch power efficiently at far higher voltages, frequencies and temperatures than older semiconductors such as gallium arsenide. First synthesized around 1932, with early work by Robert Juza and Harry Hahn in 1938, high-quality gallium nitride did not mature until the 1980s and 1990s, when practical p-type doping opened the way to commercial blue and white light-emitting diodes and violet laser diodes used in Blu-ray players. Beyond lighting, gallium nitride transistors now anchor high-power, high-frequency electronics: efficient chargers, electric-vehicle power electronics, military phased-array radar and microwave amplifiers. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Primary UseSourced to the subject's own accountBlue and white LEDs and violet laser diodes; high-power, high-frequency transistors for chargers, electric-vehicle power electronics and radar amplifiers. 1 Origin YearSourced to the subject's own account Classification
Material ClassSourced to the subject's own account Connections
Associated With
Source Gallium Nitride (Wikipedia)
Gallium nitride LED layers are grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition.
Gallium nitride made efficient blue LEDs possible, recognized by the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Source Gallium Nitride (Wikipedia)
Silicon, Materials GaN devices are grown on silicon substrates and compete with silicon power devices
Both are wide-bandgap power semiconductors
In Field
Sources
1. Gallium Nitride (Wikipedia)
WikipediaIntroductory section
GaN transistors can operate at much higher temperatures and work at much higher voltages than gallium arsenide (GaAs) transistors, they make ideal power amplifiers at microwave frequencies.
Physical properties section
GaN is a very hard (Knoop hardness 14.21 GPa), mechanically stable wide-bandgap semiconductor material with high heat capacity and thermal conductivity. In its pure form it resists cracking and can be deposited in thin film on sapphire or silicon carbide, despite the mismatch in their lattice constants.
material-class sentence
Gallium nitride is a wide-bandgap III-V semiconductor with a hard wurtzite crystal structure and a 3.4 electron-volt band gap, letting it switch power efficiently at far higher voltages, frequencies and temperatures than older semiconductors such as gallium arsenide.
Associated With: Light-Emitting Diode, Lead section
direct bandgap semiconductor commonly used in blue light-emitting diodes since the 1990s.
Associated With: Blu-ray Disc, Applications section, LEDs and lasers subsection
GaN-based violet laser diodes are used to read Blu-ray Discs.
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