Fabrication of arrays of GaAs optical bistable devices

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Abstract
Arrays of fast optical bistable devices (OBD’) hold excellent promise in the implementation of parallel optical computation systems. The fabrication of an array of 9×9 μm pixels of OBD’s on a GaAs/AlGaAs molecular beam epitaxial layer is reported here. The pixels were defined by reactive ion etching in a freon, helium, and oxygen gas mixture. The array, consisting of over 100×100 devices, formed good quality, uniform interferometers, exhibiting a single fringe in transmitted light. Gate recovery times were reduced by eliminating the top AlGaAs window and by etching 9×9 μm pixels in an array. Uniform arrays of such high quality optical gates or bistable devices could handle thousands of parallel channels at a rate of several gigahertz per channel.