Metalorganic chemical vapor deposition of InGaAsN using dilute nitrogen trifluoride

The metalorganic chemical vapor deposition of In0.06Ga0.94As1−xNx, with x=0.00-0.02, has been examined using nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and tertiarybutylarsine. The solid N/V ratio increased linearly with the gas-phase N/V ratio up to a limit of 2.0% nitrogen in the film at a gas N/V=0.35. No further increase in nitrogen content could be achieved at a growth temperature of 550 °C unless the feed rate of the group III sources was reduced. It was shown that NF3 addition to the reactor results in a growth rate decrease of 40% with increasing NF3 feed rate up to 3.0×10−4 mol/min (N/V=0.35). Further addition of NF3 did not affect the growth rate, but caused the surface roughness to rise rapidly from 0.1 to over 1.0 nm. Results presented in this paper indicate that the increased surface roughness may be due to fluorine etching of the adsorbed group III elements.