A promising technique of lateral epitaxial overgrowth, namely CantiBridge epitaxy, is developed and demonstrated in order to reduce the threading dislocation density in GaN films. Using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition, the GaN films are grown on patterned sapphire fabricated by wet chemical etching, instead of traditional dry etching. The image of atomic force microscopy shows that the threading dislocations in CantiBridge-epitaxy GaN are reduced sharply, which makes a promising to realize the high-performance GaN-based optoelectronic devices. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.