Molecular Beam Epitaxy Growth of HgCdTe on Large-Area Si and CdZnTe Substrates

This paper presents the status of HgCdTe growth on large-area Si and CdZnTe substrates at Raytheon Vision Systems (RVS). The different technological tools that were used to scale up the growth from 4 inch to 6 inch diameter on Si and from 4 cm × 4 cm to 8 cm × 8 cm on CdZnTe without sacrificing the quality of the layers are described. Extremely high compositional uniformity and low macrodefect density were achieved for single- and two-color HgCdTe layers on both Si and CdZnTe substrates. Finally, a few examples of detector and focal-plane array results are included to highlight the importance of high compositional uniformity and uniformly low macrodefect density of the epitaxial layers in obtaining high operability and low cluster outages in single- and two-color focal-plane arrays (FPAs).