Investigation of GaN Photoconductive Semiconductor Switches

The suitability of commercially available wide bandgap GaN material for the fabrication of photoconductive semiconductor switches, PCSS, was investigated. A variety of PCSSs were fabricated utilizing diverse GaN samples, which were shown to exhibit significantly diverse physical properties. That is, sample characterization techniques such as cathodoluminescence (CL), photoluminescence (PL), secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), Current-Voltage behavior, and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were applied to characterize the samples prior to processing.