ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the stoichiometry-controlled crystal growth technique and its application to compound semiconductor oscillation devices. In the field of compound semiconductors, evaluation of the deviation from stoichiometry and its control are important because it seriously affects the electrical and optical characteristics. The stoichiometric control effectively reduced dislocations and point defects in semiconductor crystals. Stoichiometric control is important because crystal defects introduced by nonstoichiometry can degrade the performance of the resulting semiconductor crystals. In addition, varying composition also causes variations in the energy band gap, which cause fluctuations in the wavelength of light emission or detection; that is, reducing the yield of the device’s production process. Liquid phase epitaxy growth with the temperature difference method under controlled vapor pressure is also a useful method for compound semiconductor optical devices, such as light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, and photo diodes.
