Investigation of chlorine-based etchants in wet and dry etching technology for an InP planar Gunn diode

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/22/8/087202

Abstract Mesa etching technology is considerably important in the Gunn diode fabrication process. In this paper we fabricate InP Gunn diodes with two different kinds of chlorine-based etchants for the mesa etching for comparative study. We use two chlorine-based etchants, one is HCl-based solution (HCl/H₃PO₄), and the other is Cl₂-based gas mixture by utilizing inductively coupled plasma system (ICP). The results show that the wet etching (HCl-based) offers low cost and approximately vertical sidewall, whilst ICP system (Cl₂-based) offers an excellent and uniform vertical sidewall, and the over-etching is tiny on the top and the bottom of mesa. And the fabricated mesas of Gunn diodes have average etching rates of ～ 0.6 μ/min and ～ 1.2 μ/min, respectively. The measured data show that the current of Gunn diode by wet etching is lower than that by ICP, and the former has a higher threshold voltage. It provides a low-cost and reliable method which is potentially applied to the fabrication of chip terahertz sources.

Keywords: InP etching InP Gunn device ICP wet chemical etching

Received: 04 January 2013
Revised: 29 January 2013
Accepted manuscript online:

PACS:	72.80.Ey	(III-V and II-VI semiconductors)
	73.40.Sx	(Metal-semiconductor-metal structures)
	73.61.Ey	(III-V semiconductors)

Fund: Project supported by the Main Direction Program of Knowledge Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. 2A2011YYYJ-1123).

Corresponding Authors: Jia Rui
E-mail: jiarui@ime.ac.cn

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Bai Yang (白阳), Jia Rui (贾锐), Wu De-Qi (武德起), Jin Zhi (金智), Liu Xin-Yu (刘新宇), Lin Mei-Yu (林美玉) Investigation of chlorine-based etchants in wet and dry etching technology for an InP planar Gunn diode 2013 Chin. Phys. B 22 087202

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Investigation of chlorine-based etchants in wet and dry etching technology for an InP planar Gunn diode

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