Investigation of chlorine-based etchants in wet and dry etching technology for an InP planar Gunn diode

Mesa etching technology is considerably important in the Gunn diode fabrication process. In this paper we fabricate InP Gunn diodes with two different kinds of chlorine-based etchants for the mesa etching for comparative study. We use two chlorine-based etchants, one is HCl-based solution (HCl/H3PO4), and the other is Cl2-based gas mixture by utilizing inductively coupled plasma system (ICP). The results show that the wet etching (HCl-based) offers low cost and approximately vertical sidewall, whilst ICP system (Cl2-based) offers an excellent and uniform vertical sidewall, and the over-etching is tiny on the top and the bottom of mesa. And the fabricated mesas of Gunn diodes have average etching rates of ~ 0.6 μm/min and ~ 1.2 μm/min, respectively. The measured data show that the current of Gunn diode by wet etching is lower than that by ICP, and the former has a higher threshold voltage. It provides a low-cost and reliable method which is potentially applied to the fabrication of chip terahertz sources.