Chapter 9 - Optoelectronic Devices Integrated on Silicon

Abstract

Silicon is the established platform for analog and digital electric circuits and devices. The tremendous infrastructure and experience available in CMOS-silicon technology form an excellent basis for extending the functionality of the silicon platform by integrating new devices and materials. This approach is generally referred to as a “More than Moore” strategy, in contrast to the dimensional scaling of CMOS electronics according to Moore's law. A good example is microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). These devices are realized in silicon, building on the infrastructure, tools, and processes for CMOS devices, though additional processing steps are introduced that go beyond traditional CMOS processing schemes. Optical communication is another application area where silicon technology is now starting to play an important role. In this chapter, we will discuss the motivation for integrating optical devices in silicon and give an overview of some emerging silicon photonics technology platforms. Then, we describe the next level of integration in which III-V materials are monolithically cointegrated onto the silicon photonics platform for enhancing the functionality with active optical devices such as lasers and optical amplifiers.