Abstract

There is increasing interest in the heteroepitaxial growth of III-V compound semiconductors on Si substrates for electronic and optoelectronic applications. This interest is based upon several potential benefits that such materials would offer e.g.: 1) Si substrates are larger, stronger, and cheaper than GaAs substrates, and as a result, GaAs integrated circuit technology would benefit greatly from a GaAs/Si heteroepitaxial materials technology; 2) the field of integrated optoelectronics for information processing would also benefit in a similar way, with the added advantage that Si integrated circuits could be simply connected to optical functions with high density optical circuits grown directly on a Si substrate containing VLSI electronic circuits; 3) wafer-scale VLSI integration of Si electronic circuits requires that individual electronic functional blocks be interconnected with high-speed low-power-dissipation elements-integrated III-V compound semiconductor lasers, waveguides and detectors could potentially provide such interconnects.

© 1987 Optical Society of America