Ion mixing of III‐V compound semiconductor layered structures

Compositional disordering of III‐V compound superlattice structures has received considerable attention recently due to its potential application for photonic devices. The conventional method to induce compositional disorder in a layered structure is to implant a moderate dose of impurity ions (∼1015/cm2) into the structure at room temperature, followed by a high‐temperature annealing step (this process is referred to as IA here). Ion irradiation at room temperature alone does not cause any significant intermixing of layers. The subsequent high‐temperature annealing step tends to restrict device processing flexibility. Ion mixing (IM) is capable of enhancing compositional disordering of layers at a rate which increases exponentially with the ion irradiation temperature. As a processing technique to planarize devices, ion mixing appears to be an attractive technology. In this work, we investigate compositional disordering in the AlGaAs/GaAs and the InGaAs/InP systems using ion mixing. We found that the ion...