(Invited) Advanced III-V-on-Si Heterogeneously Integrated Platforms for Next Generation Silicon Photonics Integrated Circuits

The field of Silicon Photonics has experienced a solid and continuous progress over the last few years, gaining in technological maturity, design tools, and new methods 1. The deployment of low-cost, compact, and power-efficient photonic circuits with a high wafer yield and robustness stands as one of the fundamental pillars that sustain such progress 2. Presently, photonic circuit technology has diversified its number of available platforms. Despite the fact that indium phosphide (InP) 3 and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platforms are still considered as the workhorses of integrated photonics in terms of maturity and deployment of active (InP) and passive (SOI) components, other alternatives such as germanium-on-silicon 4, silicon nitride-on-insulator 2 or hybrid solutions combining different functional materials with Si are gaining momentum 5. A representative example is the heterogeneous III-V/Si platform 6, which has been used to develop compact photonic circuits with on-chip gain. Contrarily to the hybrid integration, the III-V-on-Si heterogeneous integration avoids the constraints of chip-to-chip alignment while enabling the simultaneous integration of hundreds of III-V gain chips in a scalable fashion. Still, the integration methods of such III-V materials on silicon need to be improved to attain the maturity level of the monolithic III-V platform, which benefits from a complete palette of technological solutions not yet available in the III-V-on-Si heterogeneous integration. More recently, an advanced heterogeneous scheme based on wafer-seed-bonding and epitaxial regrowth has emerged 7–9. The ambition is to create a generic integration scheme combining the best offered by the III-V and the Si-photonics platforms. The regrowth capability gives access to the large epitaxial toolkit available in the conventional InP monolithic platform, where several epitaxial steps are often implemented 1011. To cite some of them, the epitaxial regrowth of III-V materials to bury III-V lasers bonded onto silicon are object of intense research nowadays to overcome the thermally inefficient buried oxide 12. In this paper, we will review the advances on III-V-on-Si heterogeneous integration through the implementation of several key demonstrators and building blocks for silicon photonics, including on-chip semiconductor optical amplifiers, lasers and electro-absorption modulators. We will discuss the progress and benefits of the direct seed bonding and regrowth as well as new device designs to improve the performance. References: 1 D. Thomson et al. , “Roadmap on silicon photonics,” J. Opt. , vol. 18, no. 7, p. 73003, 2016, doi: 10.1088/2040-8978/18/7/073003. 2 S. Y. Siew et al. , “Review of Silicon Photonics Technology and Platform Development,” Journal of Lightwave Technology , vol. 39, no. 13. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., pp. 4374–4389, Jul. 01, 2021, doi: 10.1109/JLT.2021.3066203. 3 M. Smit, K. Williams, and J. Van Der Tol, “Past, present, and future of InP-based photonic integration,” APL Photonics , vol. 4, no. 5, May 2019, doi: 10.1063/1.5087862. 4 J. Chrétien et al. , “GeSn Lasers Covering a Wide Wavelength Range Thanks to Uniaxial Tensile Strain,” ACS Photonics , vol. 6, no. 10, pp. 2462–2469, Oct. 2019, doi: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b00712. 5 S. Lin et al. , “Efficient, tunable flip-chip-integrated III-V/Si hybrid external-cavity laser array,” Opt. Express , vol. 24, no. 19, p. 21454, Sep. 2016, doi: 10.1364/oe.24.021454. 6 D. Liang and J. E. Bowers, “Recent Progress in Heterogeneous III-V-on-Silicon Photonic Integration,” Light Adv. Manuf. , vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2021, doi: 10.37188/lam.2021.005. 7 K. Takeda, S. Matsuo, T. Fujii, K. Hasebe, T. Sato, and T. Kakitsuka, “Epitaxial growth of InP to bury directly bonded thin active layer on SiO2/Si substrate for fabricating distributed feedback lasers on silicon,” IET Optoelectron. , vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 151–157, 2015, doi: 10.1049/iet-opt.2014.0138. 8 C. Besancon et al. , “AlGaInAs Multi-quantum Well Lasers On Silicon-on-insulator Photonic Integrated Circuits Based On InP-seed-bonding And Epitaxial Regrowth,” Appl. Sci. , vol. 12, no. 1, Jan. 2022, doi: 10.3390/app12010263. 9 Y. Hi et al. , “Electrically-Pumped 1.31 μm MQW Lasers by Direct Epitaxy on Wafer-Bonded InP-on-SOI Substrate,” in Proceedings of 2018 IEEE Photonics Conference (IPC) , 2018, pp. 1–2. 10 V. Rustichelli et al. , “Monolithic integration of buried-heterostructures in a generic integrated photonic foundry process,” IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. , vol. 25, no. 5, Sep. 2019, doi: 10.1109/JSTQE.2019.2927576. 11 F. Lemaître et al. , “96 nm Extended Range Laser Source Using Selective Area Growth,” in European Conference on Optical Communication, ECOC , 2018, doi: 10.1109/ECOC.2018.8535218. 12 C. Besancon et al. , “AlGaInAs Multi-Quantum Well Laser on Silicon Achieved byDirect-Bonding and MOVPE Semi-Insulating Buried Heterostructure Regrowth,” in Compound Semiconductor Week 2023 , Jan. 2023, vol. 12, no. 1, doi: 10.3390/app12010263.