Characterization of epitaxial semiconductor growth by reflectance anisotropy spectroscopy and ellipsometry

The recent developments in optical real time analysis of epitaxial growth are reviewed. Emphasis is placed on reflectance anisotropy spectroscopy (RAS) and spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) which by their accuracy and sensitivity are presently the most promising tools for analysis of the main epitaxial methods: metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and their hybrid techniques gas source MBE (GSMBE), metal-organic MBE (MOMBE) and chemical beam epitaxy (CBE). After discussing the basic principles of the spectroscopic techniques a review is given on the contributions of real-time spectroscopy to the surface science of growth surfaces both in UHV and gas phase environments. Finally it is shown that, irrespective of the specific growth technique, RAS and SE can be used for a wide field of real-time monitoring and control tasks. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.