Fabrication of arrays of GaAs optical bistable devices

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.