Abstract

III—V heteroepitaxy on Si substrates and its application to optical devices have been widely studied in the last decade. Nevertheless, performance has not reached the level at which these devices can be put to practical use because of the inferior quality of heteroepitaxial materials. The reason that III — V/Si has such a high density dislocation has not been precisely determined, and therefore adequate approaches to solving the problem have not been developed. The high dislocation density in GaAs/Si is caused by thermal stress from different thermal expansion coefficients and not by the lattice mismatch.¹ We have proposed that the combination of InP and Si is promising as a heteroepitaxial device material because the thermal expansion coefficient of InP is closer to that of Si than to that of GaAs. We have been studying ways to improve the crystal quality of InP/Si substrate and the performance of laser diodes (LDs) and photodiodes (PDs) on it, which are essential optical devices for optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs).

© 1994 Optical Society of America