Nondestructive Room-Temperature Characterization Of Wafer-Sized Iii-V Semiconductor Device Structures Using Contactless Electromodulation And Surface Photovoltage Spectroscopy - Invited Paper

This paper will review the use of the contactless methods of photoreflectance (PR), contactless electroreflectance (CER), and surface photovoltage spectroscopy (SPS) for the nondestructive, room temperature characterization of a wide variety of wafer-scale semiconductor device structures. Some systems that will be discussed include heterojunction bipolar transistors such as graded emitter GaAlAs/GaAs and AlInAs/InGaAs as well as GaInP/GaAs (including the determination of the built-in fields/doping levels in the emitter and collector regions, doping level and minority carrier lifetime in the base, alloy composition, and the degree of ordering in the GaInP), pseudomorphic GaAlAs/InGaAs/GaAs high electron mobility transistors (including the determination of the composition, width, and two-dimensional electron gas density in the channel), quantum well edge emitting lasers [InGaAsP/Inp (including the detection of p-dopant interdiffusion), graded index of refraction separate confinement heterostructure GaAlAs/GaAs/InGaAs], vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (determination of fundamental conduction to heavy-hole excitonic transition and cavity mode), and InAs/GaAs quantum dot lasers. These methods are already being used by more than a dozen industries world-wide for the production-line qualification of these device structures.