Impurity induced layer disordering and its importance in optoelectronic device fabrication

Summary form only given. Impurity Induced Layer Disordering (IILD) has become an established technique for the fabrication of high performance edge emitting semiconductor lasers in the AlGaAs material system. Examples of such devices are high power lasers and low threshold buried heterostructure lasers. Further, promising demonstrations have been made of the application of this technique to lateral heterojunction bipolar transistors and multiple wavelength laser arrays. In addition to the specific device applications of the IILD process, the general observation of enhanced interdiffusion in the presence of impurities has significance for many device processing technologies. For instance, in the InGaAlP/GaAs and InGaAsP/InP material systems, strain and defect generation result from non-uniform intermixing between the anion and cation lattice constituents. Resolution of these issues is desirable, as these material systems are key for laser device applications in the visible and telecommunications infrared wavelengths. The rapidly developing field of vertical cavity surface emitting lasers is following a path analogous to that of the edge emitting laser in the area of device process development. Disordering based techniques have been explored for the improvement of the performance of these devices.