In this article, a comprehensive treatment of the implantation-induced disordering (IID) ofCuPtB-ordered GaInP with regard to microstructuring is presented. Ion implantation reduces the thermal stability of the crystal, so that disordering occurs at temperatures smaller than 800 °C for which the ordered phase normally is stable. It is shown that IID is mediated by implantation defects and can be described quantitatively by a model based on defect annealing. From the temperature dependence of the disordering process an activation energy of 2.15 eV has been evaluated, which is supposed to be the migration enthalpy of group III vacancies. Lateral order/disorder structures were achieved by masked implantation using high resolution electron beam lithography for the definition of wire and dot implantation masks down to 35 nm width. These structures were examined using photoluminescence and transmission electron microscopy. Both methods show that the spatial resolution is determined by implantation straggling, whereas defect diffusion can be neglected. This is also confirmed by extracting the defect diffusion length from the disordering model. ©1997 American Institute of Physics.