ABSTRACT

Lattice mismatch epitaxy is vital to synthesizing a wide range of

materials on a limited number of available substrates. To realize

compound semiconductor devices for any desired application,

a variety of material systems and alloy combinations must be

tuned to match the rather small choice of existing substrates.

Considerable efforts have been made over the last few decades to

epitaxially grow dissimilar materials with larger or smaller lattice

size than that of the substrate. Strain buildup in such epilayers

results in defects that are detrimental to reliable device operation.

With advances in growth techniques combined with careful lattice

engineering, significant progress has beenmade to reduce the defect

density. The applications for semiconductor devices are numerous

and the interest in heteroepitaxy has been increasing steadily to implement and integrate differentmaterial systemswith the already

existing and well-established technology. Other factors, such as cost,

size, and quality of the available wafers, electrical/optical/thermal

properties, compatibility of device integration, make mismatch

lattice engineering even more significant. This chapter focuses on

antimonide-based materials and devices that can be grown on two

verywell-studied substrates, GaAs and Si. A very unique scheme that

can accommodate the strain mismatch, called the interfacial-misfit

(IMF)-dislocation-array technique, is presented. In the later sections

of this chapter, the growth and formation of misfit dislocation

arrays, structural characterizations, strain energy calculations, and

modeling of these arrays will be presented.