MOCVD growth of p-doped thin-film zinc selenide

Zinc Selenide (ZnSe) is a II-VI semiconductor with a band gap of 2.67 eV. The large bandgap makes it a promising material for the development of blue-green electro-optic devices and for the improvement of the storage density of memories. The major research problem associated with ZnSe is the difficulty in doping it p type. While there have been reports of good p doped ZnSe grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), there have not been any reliable reports of heavily doped p type ZnSe grown by metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). MOCVD is a much cheaper process than MBE. It has high throughput and can be used for commercial production. Thus it is of great interest to investigate the development of ZnSe by MOCVD. We report here a MOCVD technique for obtaining high quality p doped ZnSe. Growth parameters have been optimized to yield p type ZnSe doped to as much as $\rm 7.9\times10\sp{17}/cm\sp{3},$ which should be adequate for development of ZnSe blue-green LEDs