A new technique, using optical lithography, has been developed to produce very thick submicron gates. This technique has produced Al gates 900Å long and 1.7

m thick, for an aspect-ratio (gate thickness/gate length) of ∼19. Using this high aspect-ratio gate (gate-wall) structure, GaAs MESFET\´s have been fabricated with gate lengths that range from 0.1

m to 0.6

m, and gate widths as wide as

m. Gate resistances of 17Ω/mm and 37 Ω/mm of gate width have been measured for half-micron and quarter-micron long Al gates, respectively.