This paper reviews the different specifications required for a high yield and low cost epitaxial process of heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) structures on GaAs and InP substrate. For these two semiconductor systems, it is shown that arsenide/phosphide heterostructures and carbon doping of thenpn HBT base layer lead to both high device reliability and simple and reproducible HBT fabrication process. Other requirements concerning high growth rate, low and constant growth temperature, high growth uniformity on several wafers as well as low surface defect density are also identified. It is shown that chemical beam epitaxy (CBE) and metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE) techniques fit all these requirements while molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) must be improved on specific points.