Depth profiled Doppler broadening of positron annihilation spectroscopy (DBPAS), which is also called the variable energy positron annihilation spectroscopy (VEPAS), is used in characterization of GaN grown on sapphire substrates with metal-organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD). The GaN film and the film/substrate interface are investigated. The VEPFIT (variable energy positron fit) software was used for analysing the data, and the positron diffusion length of the sapphire is obtained. The results suggest that there is a highly defected region near the GaN/sapphire interface. This thin dislocated region is generated at the film/substrate interface to relieve the strain. Effects of implantation dose on defect formation, for the GaN/Sapphire samples, which implanted by Al⁺ ions, are also investigated. Studies on Al⁺ implanted GaN films (not including the interface and sapphire) have revealed that there are two different regions of implantation damage. For the low Al⁺ implantation dose samples, in the region close to the surface, defects are mainly composed of vacancy pairs with small amount of vacancy clusters, and in the interior region of the film the positron traps are vacancy clusters without micro-voids. For the highest dose sample, however, some positron trap centres are in the form of micro-voids in the second region.