Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2011
During heat treatment of GaAs there is a tendency for arsenic to evaporate. This process can have deleterious consequences and must be controlled during the annealing of GaAs by using encapsulants. In this work we use a Cr collector to catch the evaporated atoms. This collector is placed on top of GaAs or GaAs/cap during annealing. We survey the effectiveness of W, Hf and HfN as capping materials for thermal annealings of 10 min. for 450–700 C and compare them to Si3N4. The backscattering spectrometry results show that Si3N4 and W were excellent caps up to 700 C for 10 min. No evaporation was defected through HfN either, but hillock formation was detected on the surface. Hf failed because of its chemical reaction with GaAs at 650 C, 10 min.