Unexpected aspects of strain relaxation and compensation in InGaAs metamorphic structures grown by MOVPE

Abstract

We present a selection of stack designs for MOVPE grown InxGa1-xAs metamorphic buffer layers following various convex-down compositional continuous gradients of the In content, showing that defect generation and strain can be managed in a variety of ways, some rather unexpected (and unreported). Indeed, we observe that it is possible to grow surprisingly thick tensile strained layers on metamorphic substrates, without significant relaxation and defect generation. We believe our findings give significant insights to the investigation of strain, relaxation and defect distribution in metamorphic buffer design, so to obtain properly engineered/tailored structures (the most successful ones already finding applications in device growth).