We have developed a two‐component chemically‐assisted ion‐beam etching (CAIBE) technique for dry‐etching of high‐speed multiple quantum well (MQW) laser mirrors. This two‐component process relaxes several constraints in the dry‐etching of Al containing opto‐electronic device structures with Cl2alone. The strained 3×100 &mgr;m2In0.35Ga0.65As/GaAs undoped andp‐doped 4‐QW ridge waveguide lasers containing GaAs/AlAs binary short‐period superlattice cladding layers with cavities fabricated by this CAIBE technique demonstrate record direct modulation bandwidths of 24 GHz (Ibias=25 mA) and 33 GHz (Ibias=65 mA), respectively. ©1995 American Institute of Physics.