Fabrication and characterization of indium arsenide nanostructures

As MOSFET downscaling continues in the sub-0.1μm regime, quantum effects such as size quantization, phase coherence, and ballistic transport will gradually dominate the traditional MOSFET characteristics. It is important to understand these quantum effects in order to design future semiconductor devices. Among the available material systems, the InAs/AlSb quantum well system is particularly suitable for studying quantum effects.; Our goal is to develop a fabrication technique for high quality InAs nanostructures and characterize them through transport measurements. Device patterns are defined by e-beam lithography and transferred into the InAs quantum well samples through either dry or wet etching. Dry etching is anisotropic and uniform, desirable for nanofabrication. However, ion bombardment induced damages create reduces the electron mobility. In contrast, shallow wet etching has good controllability and no damage to the crystal structure. Using shallow wet etching and surface Fermi level shifting, we can induce electron conducting channel in the InAs quantum well. Liquid helium temperature transport measurements show shallow-etched InAs channels can have an electron mobility of 4.3 × 105cm2/V·s and a mean free path of 7.5μm. We have successfully fabricated high quality InAs nanostructures.; This dissertation is organized as the following: The theories and experimental studies of quantum effects in nanostructures, and the advantages of the InAs/AlSb system in nanofabrication are reviewed in Chapter 1. The development of our nanometer-scale electron beam lithography (EBL) is described in Chapter 2. Our achievement includes 25nm line width and ±10nm multilevel EBL alignment accuracy. The nanofabrication using RIE mesa etching technique is addressed in Chapter 3. Using RIE for pattern transferring, we have successfully fabricated nanostructures with arbitrary geometry and the smallest feature size we have produced is 30nm. Chapter 4 is dedicated to our novel nanofabrication scheme using shallow wet etching and surface Fermi level shifting. Our fabricated nanostructures show high mobility, long mean free path and long phase coherence length. Given our 80nm feature size, it is possible to build a complex coherent circuit within the phase coherence length. Finally, my conclusions will be given in Chapter 5.