CHARACTERISTICS OF A 2-COMPONENT CHEMICALLY-ASSISTED ION-BEAM ETCHING TECHNIQUE FOR DRY-ETCHING OF HIGH-SPEED MULTIPLE-QUANTUM-WELL LASER MIRRORS

We have developed a two-component chemically-assisted ion-beam etching (CAIBE) technique for dry-etching of high-speed multiple quantum well (MQW) laser mirrors. This two-component process relaxes several constraints in the dry-etching of Al containing opto-electronic device structures with Cl-2 alone. The strained 3X100 mu m(2) In0.35Ga0.65As/GaAs undoped and p-doped 4-QW ridge waveguide lasers containing GaAs/AlAs binary shea-period superlattice cladding layers with cavities fabricated by this CAIBE technique demonstrate record direct modulation bandwidths of 24 GHz (I-bias=25 mA) and 33 GHz (I-bias=65 mA), respectively. (C) 1995 American Institute of Physics.