Hydrogen passivation of defects and impurities in GaAs and InP
Hydrogen passivation experiments in GaAs and InP are discussed. For GaAs it is argued that the results of hydrogen passivation of shallow donors, shallow acceptors and deep centers in materials with different Fermi level positions as well as diffusion data for undoped or lightly doped GaAs are consistent with the assumption that hydrogen is neutral or amphoteric (at least at rather high temperatures of treatment). Some new interesting effects are reported such as improvement of GaAs homogeneity as revealed by microcathodoluminescence imaging and also hydrogen passivation of surface states in GaAs. Evidence is presented that hydrogenation in direct plasmas leads to damage region formation at the surface of the GaAs. A new method of hydrogenation is described that is free from that drawback. The marked improvement of Au/n-GaAs Schottky diodes I-V characteristics is reported after using this method. This new technique is also used to hydrogenate InP for which conventional methods encounter very serious problems. In InP the results of hydrogen passivation experiments on shallow donors and acceptors imply that hydrogen is a deep donor. An interesting effect of injection annealing at room temperature of hydrogen-donor complexes inn-InP is observed.