Abstract

The integration of III-V semiconductors on Silicon is one of the key processes needed to build a versatile Silicon Photonics platform incorporating active and passive components. The direct epitaxy of III-V materials on Si can be considered the ultimate strategy to achieve this but, depending on the approach, still faces challenges in reaching sufficient crystalline quality, and/or interfacing with other silicon photonics components, and/or demonstrating electrical injection. Here, we present a loss-coupled DFB nano-ridge laser that is easier to process than our earlier demonstrated devices and opens the road towards electrical injection of these nanoscale lasers. The nano-ridges are epitaxially grown on a standard 300-mm Si wafer using the aspect ratio trapping (ART) technique to suppress defects, for details see [1, 2]. The high crystalline quality of the nano-ridges was proven before through characterization of their material gain [3] and the demonstration of optically-pumped lasing from a DFB cavity with etched gratings [4]. Electrical injection could not yet be demonstrated as depositing a continuous metal contact directly on top of the nano-ridge, only 300nm away from the active QWs, would result in a prohibitively large loss (>300dB/cm). Here, patterned metal gratings are deposited on the top of the nano-ridge instead.

© 2019 IEEE