Patent ID: 8882909

Claim:
A method of growing gallium arsenide layers (GaAs) on relaxed germanium buffer layers on a misoriented silicon substrate comprising: cleaning a surface of a Si wafer by a wet chemical treatment or a hydrogen plasma treatment; loading the Si wafer into a low-energy plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (LEPECVD) reactor; increasing temperature in a LEPECVD reactor to approximately 600° C.; epitaxially growing a Si buffer layer less than 5 μm thick on the Si wafer by LEPECVD; epitaxially growing a Ge buffer layer by LEPECVD on the Si buffer until a thickness of the Ge buffer layer is reached within a range of 0.75 to 5 μm, thereby relaxing the Ge buffer layer and reducing surface roughness measured by AFM amounts to typically 1 nm rms; and annealing a resulting heterostructure by raising the temperature to above 700° C. either in the LEPECVD reactor or in a separate annealing oven, for about 10 minutes; loading the Si wafer into another deposition chamber; and growing a layer of GaAs using a vapor deposition method.