Study of reactive ion etching-induced damage in GaAs/AlGaAs structures using a quantum well intermixing probe

Abstract

We report the damage distribution induced by C2F6 and SiCl4 reactive ion etching (RIE) using quantum wells and quantum well intermixing (QWI) as probes. Photoluminescence emission at 77 K was measured both before and after rapid thermal annealing at 900 °C for 30 s. Our results show that the QWI probing technique can effectively be utilized as a sensitive probe of RIE damage. A damage depth of 650 Å before annealing and blue shifts of up to 65 meV after annealing were obtained in C2F6 RIE regions. A damage depth of 100 Å and blue shifts of up to 30 meV were observed in SiCl4 RIE regions.