Nondestructive room-temperature characterization of wafer-sized III-V semiconductor device structures using contactless electromodulation and surface photovoltage spectroscopy

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 the 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.