RIE of III-V materials using CH/sub 4/ or CH/sub 3/Cl in H/sub 2/

Summary form only given. The desire to progress away from the highly corrosive, chlorine based reactive ion etching of III-V semiconductor materials has lead to the development of metal organic reactive ion etching, where methane, diluted in an inert gas, is the reactive species. For our experiments, we used hydrogen to dilute the methane since this plasma system provides very smooth etch profiles in a less corrosive environment. The methane/hydrogen RIE process was investigated by studying the effect etch parameters had on both the etch rate variations of a variety of III-V optoelectronic materials, such as InP, GaAs, Al/sub 0.6/Ga/sub 0.4/As and indium tin oxide, ITO and the electrical characteristics of surface damaged Au/GaAs Schottky diodes.