Abstract

In recent years, dry etching techniques such as ion-beam-assisted etching (IBAE) [1] have gained considerable application in the fabrication of semiconductor guided-wave devices. In contrast to the more conventional wet-chemical etching techniques, IBAE has less material and crystallographic dependence and is capable of forming deep, vertical grooves without undercutting the mask. In this paper, we report the use of IBAE to fabricate various types of 1.3-μm wavelength InGaAsP/InP mass-transported buried-heterostructure (BH) lasers [2,3]. These devices include high performance single-stripe lasers and Y-coupled BH laser arrays [4] with deep rectangular mesas defined by IBAE, lasers with flat and cylindrical end-mirrors [5,6] which are etched and mass-transported concurrently with the mesa stripes, and arrays of diffraction-coupled BH lasers [7,8] in which the mirror at the end of the coupling region has a scalloped surface designed to improve the coupling.

© 1988 Optical Society of America