| A periodic GaAs wafer-bonded structure has been proposed for quasi-phase-matched (QPM) second harmonic generation (SHG). The basic bonding technology involves elevated temperatures and pressures, which can lead to unacceptable optical losses and poor device performance. Three sources of optical losses were first found in this study: (1) decomposition at the exposed surface, (2) interfacial defects between the bonded wafers, and (3) bulk defects within the wafers.; Bulk and surface defects were studied by measuring the optical transmission through single GaAs. It was found that an increase in bonding temperature and/or time led to an increase in the bulk and surface defects. An increase in the free hole concentration (thermal conversion) is though to be the major cause of the optical losses by a free carrier absorption mechanism. Since it was difficult to eliminate free-carrier and interfacial defect losses once they have formed because of diffusion kinetic limitations, processing conditions that minimized their formation were sought. In contrast, defects on the external surfaces caused by arsenic depletion resulting from incongruent evaporation were easily eliminated by repolishing.; Interfacial defects were studied by introducing artificial voids into the interface region by bonding topographically-patterned GaAs wafers to unpatterned wafers. We found that the filling of these artificial voids depended strongly on the magnitude of the height of the surface irregularities on the wafer interfaces, as well as on temperature and time. Typically, when bonding temperature and time were increased, the interfacial defect density decreased. After bonding, two kinds of features corresponding to the newly bonded areas were observed by IR microscopy. These two features, having diamond and dendrite geometries, were shown to depend on both surface energy anisotropy and growth rate anisotropy.; An investigation of the relationship between bonding conditions (temperature, time and pressure) and optical losses (resulting from bulk, interfacial and surface defects), has led to the development of an optimized process for preparing periodic GaAs structures useful in quasi-phase-matched second harmonic generation applications. With this bonding process, low optical loss ({dollar}sim{dollar}0.1-0.3%/interface) wafer-bonded (110) structures (containing up to 40 layers) for practical device applications were first fabricated in this study. |
