Special angle technique with Ar/O2 - RIBE for the fabrication of steep NM-scale profiles in InGaAsP/InP and subsequent epitaxial overgrowth

Ar/O2 - Reactive Ion Beam Etching (RIBE) is a very versatile dry etching method to realize microstructures even in the nm-scale range in the material system InGaAsP/InP. In this paper we demonstrate the possibility to realize steep profiles with an angle of inclination of around 83° and 600 nm in depth. By using a special combination of angles of ion incidence, usually occuring drawbacks of ion beam etching techniques are overcome. Epitaxial overgrowth of stripes etched this way by Low Pressure-Metalorganic Vapour Deposition (LP-MOCVD) shows a clear dependency on crystallographic orientation ([011] or [0–11]) of the stripes.