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Anisotropic Dry Etching of InGaAs for Self-aligned FETs

• Authors: L. W. Guo, J. A. del Alamo

As CMOS technology continues to scale to the nanometer regime, there has been a strong demand for alternative materials to replace silicon. III-V materials, in particular, have shown great promise in extending the road map for high-performance CMOS technology because of their superior electron transport properties ^[1] . However, many III-V FETs are still fabricated using wet etchants that are difficult to control and give large undercuts, decreasing their feasibility for use in commercial logic applications that require very tight footprints. In addition, oversized gate-source and gate-drain separations result in parasitic series resistances that play a large role in degrading device characteristics. A great need exists for a low-damage and highly anisotropic dry-etch process for scaled logic III-V FETs.

This study explored a dry-etching technique for InGaAs caps using CH₄-based chemistry with the addition of SF₆. While a CH₄/H₂ dry etch chemistry gave relatively anisotropic sidewalls with minimal undercut, it was found that this chemistry alone gave rough surfaces, shown in Figure 1. With the addition of SF₆ to the discharge, the surface roughness of etched InGaAs was reduced significantly without affecting anisotropy, shown in Figure 2. Furthermore, when the same CH₄/H₂ dry etch without SF₆ was performed on a GaAs surface, it was found to give smooth surfaces, suggesting that the rough surface could be attributed to the formation of indium-based residue

Besides improving the surface roughness of InGaAs dry etching, the addition of SF₆ to the CH₄/H₂ plasma can also promote the use of InAlAs as an etch stop through the formation of AlF₃ compounds upon reaching the InAlAs surface ^[2] . However, a drawback to the use of SF₆, and many fluorine-containing compounds, is that it attacks silicon oxide and silicon nitride, reducing the effectiveness of these materials as dry-etching masks.

Our research will continue to explore selective dry etching chemistries for III-V heterostructures that provide smooth, highly anisotropic sidewalls with low damage.



Figure 1: Surface of an InGaAs sample after a 20-min dry etch using CH4/H2 chemistry with an ECR power of 200W.



Figure 2: The addition of SF6 to the CH4/H2 chemistry appreciably improves the smoothness of etched InGaAs surfaces.




1. J. A. del Alamo, “Nanometer-scale electronics with III-V compound semiconductors,” Nature, vol. 479, pp. 317-323, November 2011. [↩]
2. S. J. Pearton and W. S. Hobson, “Selective dry etching of InGaAs and InP over AlInAs in CH₄/H₂/SF₆,” Applied Physics Letters, vol. 56, pp. 2186-2188, May 1990. [↩]