Abstract

The successful results on surface gettering of background impurities and defects in 1.6 mm thick (111) GaAs wafers have been obtained. For the gettering, the wafers were coated by a 1000 Å thick yttrium film either on one side or on both sides followed by a heat treatment. It has allowed the electron concentration to decrease from (1–2)´10 15 cm -3 down to 10 8 –10 10 cm -3 and the mobility to increase from 1500–2000 cm 2 V -1 s -1 up to 7000 cm 2 V -1 s -1 at 300 K. The distribution profiles of the electron concentration and of the hole effective lifetime throughout the wafer thickness as well as photoluminescence spectra at 2 K have been presented.