Reactive Ion Etching (RIE) and Magnetron Ion Etching (MIE) Combinations for Opto-Electronic Integrated Circuit (OEIC) Processing

There has been a growing interest in the application of low pressure plasma environments to III-V etching techniques. This interest has been generated by the need to etch sub-micron features with better linewidth and resolution than that which can be obtained with wet etching. This paper presents the results of combining RIE, the popular technique of etching III-V semiconductors, with MIE, a technique that has found considerable success in silicon processing. The combination of these two types of etchers to the fabrication of BICFET's [1], HFET's [2], DOES [3], and HFETPD's [4] has yielded high performance electronic and opto-electronic structures.