Characteristics of a two-component chemically-assisted ion-beam etching technique for dry-etching of high-speed multiple quantum well laser mirrors

We have developed a two-component chemically-assisted ion-beam etching (CAIBE) technique for dry-etching of high-speed multiple quantum well (MQW) laser mirrors. This two-component process relaxes several constraints in the dry-etching of Al containing opto-electronic device structures with Cl2 alone. The strained 3×100 μm2 In0.35Ga0.65As/GaAs undoped and p-doped 4-QW ridge waveguide lasers containing GaAs/AlAs binary short-period superlattice cladding layers with cavities fabricated by this CAIBE technique demonstrate record direct modulation bandwidths of 24 GHz (Ibias=25 mA) and 33 GHz (Ibias=65 mA), respectively.