Elimination of oval defects in epilayers by using chemical beam epitaxy

Abstract

One ubiquitous problem that continues to haunt over molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) persistently throughout all these year and still without a good controllable solution is the presence of oval defects in gallium-containing compound semiconductor epilayers. While these defects have not presented major problems for discrete devices, they are likely to be a serious obstacle for integrated circuit applications. We showed that oval defects were present in GaAs and In0.53Ga0.47As epilayers grown by conventional MBE process using elemental Ga and In as group III sources, and either solid As4 or thermally cracked As4 from gas mixtures of trimethylarsine and hydrogen. On the other hand, the use of the chemical beam epitaxy in which the Ga and In were derived by thermal pyrolysis of their metal alkyls at the heated substrate surface resulted reproducibly in epilayers free of oval defects over the entire substrate surface of ∼8 cm diameter (limited by the substrate holder size). On the basis of the present results it is evident that the oval defects were related to the use of elemental Ga melt as the evaporant in conventional MBE.