Excimer laser induced quantum well intermixing: a reproducibility study of the process for fabrication of photonic integrated devices

Excimer (ultraviolet) laser-induced quantum well intermixing (UV-Laser-QWI) is an attractive technique for wafer level post-growth processing and fabrication of a variety of monolithically integrated photonic devices. The results of UV-Laser-QWI employed for the fabrication of multibandgap III-V semiconductor wafers have demonstrated the attractive character of this approach although the process accuracy and reproducibility have remained relatively weakly covered in related literature. We report on a systematic investigation of the reproducibility of this process induced with a KrF excimer laser. The influence of both the irradiation with different laser doses and the annealing temperatures on the amplitude of intermixing in InGaAs/InGaAsP/InP quantum well heterostructures has been evaluated based on the photoluminescence measurements. Under optimized conditions, the process allows to blue shift the bandgap of a heterostructure by more than 100 nm with a remarkable 5.3% relative standard deviation. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America