Recent developments in II-VI substrates

There are many attempts for stable growth of II-VI compound semiconductor bulk single crystals because of their interesting applications in many fields. However, it is difficult to obtain high quality II-VI substrates. Therefore, these materials have been grown epitaxially on the substrates of different materials. In this epitaxial growth, defects are generated at the interface between substrates and epitaxial films. It is known that these defects deteriorate the quality and shorten the lifetime of devices fabricated on these epitaxial films. Therefore, high quality substrates for home-epitaxy in II-VI materials are strongly required. However, stable industrial crystal growth methods for most of II-VI materials have not been established yet. There are several attempts to grow single crystals using novel techniques. In this paper, recent developments in the bulk crystal growth of II-VI materials, including CdTe, ZnSe and ZnTe, will be reviewed. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.