Micro Dry Etching Process for Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers,

A microcavity surface emitting SE laser is very attractive for future optoelectronic applications such as optical parallel processing and optical interconnections. In order to realize such a low threshold SE laser, micro-fabrication providing a low damage etch is one of important issues. We have introduced a reactive ion etch RIE and reactive ion beam etch RIBE technique to fabricate a tiny dielectric multilayer reflector and micro-resonator for surface emitting lasers. In most of SE laser structures, a SiO2TiO2 dielectric multilayer reflector or semiconductor multilayer mirror is used as high reflective mirrors. However, it has been difficult to fabricate the microcavity with steep side walls by wet chemical etching since each material has different etching rates. Dry etch techniques for multilayer structures, especially for GaInAsPInP semiconductors, have not been fully studied.