Due to the lack of cost-effective homogeneous substrates, nitride films are generally grown on various heterogeneous substrates (Zhang et al. in J Electron Mater 32:364–370, 2003 [1]; Banal et al. in Appl Phys Lett 92, 2008 [2]). Whether sapphire or Si substrates, nitrides have a large lattice mismatch and thermal mismatch with them. Although the mismatch is smaller for SiC substrates, SiC substates are less used due to their high price, and nitrides especially AlN, grown on SiC, are prone to cracking. On the whole, the large mismatch in lattice and thermal expansion coefficients between nitrides and conventional crystalline substrates results in high interfacial energy at the interfaces (Wu et al. in Superlattices Microstruct 125:343–347, 2019 [3]; Walde et al. in Jpn J Appl Phys 58:SC1002, 2019 [4]), and thus direct heteroepitaxial growth of nitride on them will produce a large number of natural dislocations and cause the epitaxial layer to crack.