  Freestanding single-crystalline membranes are an important building block for
functional electronics. Especially, compounds semiconductor membranes such as
III-N and III-V offer great opportunities for optoelectronics, high-power
electronics, and high-speed computing. Despite huge efforts to produce such
membranes by detaching epitaxial layers from donor wafers, however, it is still
challenging to harvest epitaxial layers using practical processes. Here, we
demonstrate a method to grow and harvest multiple epitaxial membranes with
extremely high throughput at the wafer scale. For this, 2D materials are
directly formed on III-N and III-V substrates in epitaxy systems, which enables
an advanced remote epitaxy scheme comprised of multiple alternating layers of
2D materials and epitaxial layers that can be formed by a single epitaxy run.
Each epilayer in the multi-stack structure is then harvested by layer-by-layer
peeling, producing multiple freestanding membranes with unprecedented
throughput from a single wafer. Because 2D materials allow peeling at the
interface without damaging the epilayer or the substrate, wafers can be reused
for subsequent membrane production. Therefore, this work represents a
meaningful step toward high-throughput and low-cost production of
single-crystal membranes that can be heterointegrated.
