ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief historical review of research and development on zinc oxide (ZnO), some basic properties and various characterization technologies applied to the studies on bulk and epitaxial ZnO, ZnO ternary alloys of AlZnO and MgZnO, nano-structural ZnO, and ZnO substrates for the growth of GaN and InGaN materials. ZnO is rapidly rising as the third class of promising wide-gap semiconductor. New oxides and compound semiconductors are developing amazingly, which may also be incorporated into the aforementioned energy-saving devices. ZnO, crystallizing in the wurtzite structure, is a direct band-gap semiconductor with a room temperature band gap of 3.37 eV, an exciton binding energy of 60 meV, and other useful properties. More interdisciplinary characterizations were applied to other ZnO-based materials, alloys of AlZnO and MgZnO, as well as nanostructures using ZnO as substrate materials by the author and collaborators.
