A New Method to Supply Solute Elements into Growth Solutions Demonstration by Liquid-Phase Epitaxial Growth of Inl_xGa~As

A controllable method to supply solute elements into growth solutions was developed by using a source current-controlled (SCC) method. A dc electric current was passed through a binary semiconductor compound used as the source material for solute elements. It was found that the source compound could be dissolved into even a saturated so-lution due to Peltier heating and Joule heating at the interface between the source compound and the solution, and that the composition f growing crystals could be controlled by the electric current passed through the source compound. The SCC method was demonstrated by the liquid-phase pitaxial growth of In,_~Ga~As on YnP. GaAs and InAs were used as source compounds. Good quality ePitaxial ayers such as In0..~:~Ga0.47As and Inj_,Ga~.As~_,P, compounds must be lattice-matched to substrates. If bulk single crystals of the ternary or quater-nary compounds were available, epitaxial layers with various lattice constants could be freely grown on bulk single crystals used as substrates, and available crystals for device fabrication would remarkably increase