Device characterization of the VCSEL-on-silicon as an on chip light source

Abstract

Advancement of silicon photonics technology can offer a new dimension in data communications with un-precedent bandwidth. Increasing the integration level in the silicon photonics is required to develop compact high-performance chip-level optical interconnects for future systems. Especially, monolithic integration of light source on a silicon wafer is important for future silicon photonic integrated circuits, since realizing a compact on-chip light source on a silicon wafer is a serious issue which impedes practical implementation of the silicon photonic interconnects. At present, due to the lack of a practical light source based on Group IV elements, flip chip-bonded or packaged lasers based on III–V semiconductor are usually being used as external light sources, to feed silicon modulators on SOI wafers to complete a photonic transmitter, except the reported silicon hybrid lasers monolithic-integrated on SOI wafers. To overcome above problem, we have proposed a compact on-chip light source, the directly monolithic-integrated VCSEL on a bulk silicon wafer (VCSEL-on-Si), based on the transplanted epitaxial film by substrate lift-off process and following device-fabrication on the bulk Si wafer. This can offer practical low-power-consumption light sources integrated on a silicon wafer, which can provide a complete chip-level I/O set when combined with monolithic-integrated vertical-illumination Ge-on-Si photodetectors on the same silicon wafer. In this work, we report the characterization of direct-modulation VCSELs-on-Si for λ ~850 nm with CW optical output power > ~2 mW and the threshold current < ~3 mA, over 10 Gb/s operations. We also discuss about the thermal characteristics of the VCSELs-on-Si.