A REVIEW OF CBE, MOMBE AND GSMBE

This paper reviews briefly the recent progress in III-V compound semiconductor epilayer and heterostructure preparations by the three different approaches: chemical beam epitaxy (CBE, employing both vapor group III and group V sources), metalorganic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE, employing vapor group III and solid group V sources), and gas source molecular beam epitaxy (GSMBE, employing solid group III and vapor group V sources). The results obtained so far clearly demonstrated that high quality InGaAsP/InP materials and heterostructures suitable for state-of-the-art device applications can be routinely prepared by CBE. With new metalorganic aluminum compounds becoming available, high quality GaAs/AlGaAs with low residual carbon background also has successfully been prepared recently. GaAs/AlGaAs modulation doped field-effect transistors prepared by CBE have similar device performance as those prepared by molecular beam epitaxy. Recently, there is also a great interest in using CBE for the preparation of Si, SiGe, and II-VI compound semiconductor layers.