The combination of lateral patterning techniques with refined molecular beam epitaxy methods will give considerable opportunities for the fabrication and study of extended nanostructures in the coming decade. A first target will be the understanding and exploitation of a host of quantum transport phenomena discovered in the last few years. The prospect of practicable quantum devices and circuits which utilise the coherent wave properties of the electron remains problematic but a range of new devices which exploit the Coulomb blockade is under investigation. The latter hold promise for high temperature operation and strong immunity against quantum fluctuations. The next decade should see the first exploration of the granular electronic limit in which one carrier might be expected to represent one bit of information. The granular electronic regime will provide an important arena for the resolution of fundamental controversies in quantum mechanics.

We have successfully used an ultrathin (20-50 Å) native oxide layer on the surface of InP as an etch mask for transferring patterns onto the substrate. The oxide mask is grown in situ in O2 atmosphere, and the mask pattern is created by locally removing the oxide with a focused ion beam. Depending on the thickness of the mask, the required ion dose varies from 2×1014 to 2×1015 Ga/cm2. C12 etches the exposed areas selectively. Features as deep as 3 microns have been produced with such an ultrathin mask. High quality InGaAs and InP epitaxial layers have been overgrown on such patterned substrate. We have studied the formation and desorption of the oxide mask with Auger analysis. We also demonstrate that the secondary charged particle emission from a substrate during ion exposure provides a useful signal for the determination of the required dose.

Selective cpitaxial growth during metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) can be accomplished over a wide range of growth conditions through the usC of alternative growth precursors. We have used chlorine-containing growth precursors, such as diethyl gallium chloride, (C2H5)2GaCl, to selectively grow GaAs and AlxGa1x As. The growth process has been thermodynamically modelled in order to estimate relative growth rates and alloy composition. This model indicates that near the growth front the growth process is chemically similar to the inorganic-based growth of compound semiconductors. This growth technique has been applied to the growth of extremely low resistance ohmic contact structures and quantum well structures.

Rapid Thermal Chemical Vapor Deposition (RTCVD) offers great promise for deposition of high-quality, thin, abrupt interface epitaxial films. In addition, RTCVD systems operate under cold wall environment to minimize particles and cross contamination. SEG of silicon provides both isolation and active device wells with fine dimensional control. A combination of RTCVD and SEG holds great promise for future VLSI circuit technologies. In this paper, we present our results on selective growth of single crystal silicon using RTCVD.

Selective area Epitaxy (SE) of high quality GaAs on Si films has been achieved using conventional MOCVD and Atomic Layer Epitaxy (ALE) nucleation techniques. Epitaxial GaAs films were deposited inside windows etch patterned in the oxide coated Si wafers. SE was found to eliminate wafer warpage, reduce film cracking and reduce the tensile stresses for islands less than 200 µm/side. Complete stress relief has been achieved in 10 µm/side islands after oxide removal. Defect reduction techniques have been employed resulting in two orders of magnitude reduction in the dislocation density and excellent surface morphologies. This paper addresses the potential of SE, by the above techniques in improving the quality of the GaAs on Si films.

The growth of GaAs films by MBE on mesa-type patterned Si substrates has been investigated. Mesa widths were varied from 10 µm to 200 µm and were prepared using chemical etching with Si3N4 masks and reactive ion etching. The residual stress in the epitaxial layer was estimated using low temperature (7K) photoluminescence and the defect distribution was studied by cross sectional TEM, dislocation densities were in addition determined by etch pits. The residual stress and the dislocation density decreased monotonically with the reduction of growth area. By the incorporation of strained layers with the reduction of growth area, the etch pit density in GaAs layers on mesas was reduced further.

We present a study of island formation (the transition from 2D to 3D growth) during the Stranski-Krastanow (S-K) growth of Ge on Si. The energetic driving force for S-K island formation should be the ability to relax the islands by dislocation introduction. Here, we show that Ge islands formed on Si (100) are initially dislocation-free, in the presence of a 2D “sea” that is far in excess of the equilibrium 3 monolayers (ML). We call this phase of growth “dislocation-free S-K”. The 2-D sea does not collapse until dislocated islands are produced at an average coverage of = 7 ML. We call the dislocation-free island phase “coherent S-K” growth. The corresponding 2D-3D transition on Si (111) appears to reach equilibrium far faster, and we have not observed dislocation-free island formation: dislocated islands are seen at = 5 ML. As expected, the kinetics allow us to suppress island formation on (100) by reducing the growth temperature. These thick 2D films are analogous to those grown on As-covered surfaces, but have a microstructure dominated by edge dislocations.

Selective-area MBE growth of Si1−xGex film is examined using a Si substrate partially covered with SiO2 film. Elimination of misfit dislocations is observed by TEM. Two possible mechanisms in this elimination, limitation of the lateral extension of misfit dislocations, and partial relaxation of the strain at the SiO2 pattern edge, are discussed.

We present experimental evidence for the spontaneous breaking of cubic symmetry in the band structure of films of Ga0 52 1n0 48P grown by organomeltallic vapor phase epitaxy on (100) GaAs substrates. We show how this effect is related to the spontaneous ordering of the alloy, and its correlation with the anomalous lowering of the band-gap observed in these films.

Multiple quantum well structures consisting of alternating layers of two crystalline organic semiconductors, namely, 3,4,9,10 perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydride (PTCDA) and 3,4,7,8 naphthalenetetracarboxylic dianhydride (NTCDA), have been grown by organic molecular beam deposition. The layer thickness was varied from 10 to 200 Å. Birefringence measurements indicate that there is a strong structural ordering in all PrCDA layers, although the PrCDA and NTCDA crystal structures are incommensurate. From optical absorption measurements, it is found there is a blue shift in the lowest energy PICDA singlet exciton line with decreasing layer thickness. A model based on exciton quantum confinement is proposed to explain the energy shift. We have measured the low temperature photoluminescence spectra of organic quantum well structures, and found a slight red shift in the spectra with decreasing well width. These results are also discussed.

The influence of the specimen temperature during MeV Kr irradiation on the extent of compositional disordering in GaAs-AlAs superlattices (SLs) has been determined. We have investigated whether radiation-enhanced diffusion (RED) could be employed to reduce the dose required to completely disorder a SL by ion implanation. Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition grown GaAs-AlAs SLs were implanted with 0.75 MeV Kr to a dose of 2×1016 cm−2 at various sample temperatures ranging from 133 K to 523 K. The extent of disordering induced by the irradiations was determined by Rutherford backscattering spectrometry and secondary ion mass spectrometry. For low temperature irradiations (133 K to 233 K), complete intermixing of the SL is observed. However, the extent of intermixing of the SL decreases with increasing specimen temperature between room temperature and 523 K. We propose two possible explanations to interpret these results: (i) that the amount of ion beam mixing decreases with increasing temperature; and (ii) that the RED coefficient is negative which suggests the existence of a miscibility gap in the GaAs-AlAs SL system.

In this paper present experimental results on the quality of AIGaAs material after high concentrations of impurities have been introduced for the purpose of impurity induced disordering. A comparison between Zn and Si diffusion is presented, and the nature of the transition region between uniform alloy and as-grown periodic structure has been characterized both experimentally and theoretically. Device implications of these observations is discussed.

Nucleation and growth mechanisms in the formation of heteroepitaxial films are reviewed. The various processes can be incorporated into rate equations to model the number density and size distribution of clusters.Recent work on extensions of this approach to include the effect of surface steps and other surface imperfections is highlighted.

The most important processes are being studied experimentally using a combination of surface-analytic and -microscopic techniques, based on SEM and STEM instrumentation. Recent examples are given in which nucleation densities, surface diffusion lengths and the effects of steps have been studied in the systems Ag/Si(lll) and Ge/Si(100).

The lattice matching condition encountered usually in the heteroepitaxial growth has been proved to be relaxed drastically, if one uses the interface having van der Waals nature. Such interface can be realized on a cleaved face of a layered material or a quasi-one dimensional material and on a surface of a dangling-bond-terminated three dimensional material. Various kinds of heterostructures, which cannot be made by conventional growth methods, can be fabricated by using a variety of layered transition metal dichalcogenides, in which there exist superconducting, metallic, semiconducting or insulating layered materials. Moreover those heterostructures have been found to be grown on such an ordinary three-dimensional material as GaAs, if the dangling bonds on its surface are terminated by suitable atoms.

A method for analysing the form of dislocation arrays which accommodate misfit at epitaxial interfaces based on the Frank-Bilby expression of the dislocation content of an interface is presented. Emphasis is placed on the deformation of a crystal in the presence of a dislocation array, and ease of formulation through use of an orthogonal reference frame. Several aspects of epitaxial growth are subsequently addressed, including the uniqueness of a dislocation array accommodating a given misfit. In the case of growth on vicinal cubic surfaces, it is shown that dislocations generated to relieve misfit may also lead to misorientation of the overlayer. From experimental measurements of dislocation densities using transmission electron microscopy, it is possible to calculate the state of strain in a metastable misfitting epitaxial layer. When misfit is not isotropic in the interface (such as for silicon or niobium grown on sapphire) it is shown that dislocation line directions may not lie along low index directions in either crystal, a point which is particularly important with regard to studies of interfacial structure by high resolution electron microscopy.

In situ measurements of dislocations at growth temperature have been made on the heteroepitaxial systems of GaAs/Si and GaP/Si. It was found that the etch pit densities of heteroepitaxial layers were as low as those of bulk wafers at the growth temperature and increase to 107 cm−2 when the layers cool down to room temperature. This means that the thermal stress determines the quality of heteroepitaxial layers.

The InP on Si system, in which the thermal expansion coefficient difference is smaller than other heteroepitaxial systems, has been studied. High quality InP has been obtained using a GaAs buffer layer, strained-layer superlattice insertion, and thermal cycle annealing and regrowth. Full width at half maximum of X-ray rocking curve was 110" at 13 µ thickness.

An InGaAsP laser diode emitting at 1.55 µm was successfully made on Si. The threshold current was 46 mA at room temperature for a ridge waveguide laser with a 4 µm width and a 200,µm cavity length.

Luminescence spectra from quantum wells are routinely interpreted in terms of atomically smooth and atomically abrupt interfaces. Here we show that this interpretation is inconsistent with photoluminescence, photoluminescence excitation, and quantitative microscopic (chemical lattice imaging) results. We argue that the discussion of interfacial roughness in terms of “an island size” is too naive. A full characterization of an interface requires the description of a “roughness spectrum”, specifying the amplitude of the interfacial corrugation vs corrugation wavelength over the relevant length scale.

Wedge Transmission Electron Microscopy has many advantages, one of which is the concentration determination in III-V semiconductors with a fairly good accuracy. This allows us to determine the concentration variation during the growth of GaInAs/InP multilayered structures and to deduce the concentration grading at the interface GaInAs/InP (As in InP) and the abruptness of the InP/GaInAs interface.

We discuss room temperature CW operation of AlGaAs/GaAs SQW lasers and GaAs MESFETs with good pinch-off characteristic on SiO2 -back coated Si. The all-MOCVD-grown,SQW laser on Si with thermal-cycle annealing, which has the EPD of 1.5 × 107 cm−2, has the threshold current as low as 55 mA (1.41 kA/cm2) under CW operation at room temperature. The pinch-off and the sidegating effect characteristics of GaAs MESFETs on Si have been improved by using SiO2-back coating of Si and higher growth temperature. The maximum transconductance of 160 mS/mm has been obtained for the MESFET with a 2.5 × 15 µm gate. The main origin of sidegating effect associates with the channel layer-undoped GaAs layer beneath it interface. The SiO2 -back coating is found effective to obtain a lower background electron concentration in undoped GaAs layer and to control doping of the active layer in GaAs/Si.

The behavior of Si and Be impurities in InAsx Sb1−x (0.05<x<0.45) heteroepitaxial layers grown on GaAs-coated Si by MBE is characterised. Siis found to act as an n-type dopant for the growth conditions used. The calibration of the Si n-type doping as a function of the Sisource temperature is obtained by infrared absorption spectrometry, stripping Hall and SIMS depth profiling. At high doping levels the amphoterical characterof the Si impurities becomes evident. SIMS is used to investigate the dopant incorporation and the formation of diode structures. The influence of the mismatched epitaxy on the transport properties is investigated by stripping Hall measurements. In order to establish the correlation between crystalline properties of the epilayers and the ability to fabricate diodes, we compare the defect structure of InAs and In(As)Sb p-'i'-n diodes.