Epiwafer foundry and substrate maker IQE plc of Cardiff, Wales, UK says that its epitaxial wafer technology has been used in conjunction with the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) to help develop 1.3μm-emitting quantum dot (QD) lasers on silicon substrates. The aim is to enable the integration of photonics devices with silicon technology for low-cost, high-volume data communication applications.
Silicon photonics, which combines compound semiconductor devices with low-cost silicon substrates, offers the potential to integrate sophisticated laser devices with more traditional low-cost CMOS driver and waveguide technology.
The researchers believe this work represents an important step towards large-scale photonic integration in an ultra-low-cost platform for high-volume consumer applications which will lead to the mass adoption of silicon photonics.
A key feature in enabling the cost-effective integration of photonic devices with silicon technology is the ability to grow compound semiconductor quantum dots onto silicon substrates using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth technology that has a proven track record for high-volume manufacturing of wireless products.
Researchers at UCSB demonstrated a novel quantum dot laser design that not only is grown on silicon but also performs as well as similar lasers grown on their native substrates.
IQE provided both the engineered germanium/silicon substrates and the III-V MBE template growth. The growth of the quantum dot laser structure and fabrication of the laser components were performed at UCSB.
The UCSB team will discuss its record-breaking results in presentation W4C.5 ’High Performance 1.3μm InAs Quantum Dot Lasers Epitaxially Grown on Silicon’ on 12 March (5pm, room 121, Moscone Center) at the Optical Fiber Communcations conference & exposition (OFC 2014) in San Francisco (9-13 March).
