In situ cleaning/passivation of surfaces for contact technology on III-V materials

In this work we introduce the use of physical plasmas (e.g. Ar- and He-based plasmas) in order to study the in situ cleaning (prior to metal deposition) of InGaAs layers dedicated to the realisation of self-aligned contacts. For the characterisation of cleaning efficiency, we performed surface analyses like X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in attenuated total reflection mode. The first results described in this work are encouraging. We have found efficient processes for removing totally or partially III-V native oxides.