Degradation of the device characteristics of InGaAs/InP heterostructures after oxygen treatments

The effects of UV-ozone and oxygen plasma treatments on the performance of InP-based heterostructure bipolar transistors (HBTs) have been investigated. Although these processes improve the HBTs current gain, both methods induce a drastic increase of the base-collector leakage current and consequently a degradation of the device breakdown voltage. The performance degradation gets even worse when the devices are capped with a dielectric film deposited by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD).