Abstract

Although many high performance silicon photonic devices have been demonstrated, efficient on-chip light sources remain the ‘holy grail’ for Si photonics due to the indirect bandgap of silicon. III–V semiconductors, which offer excellent optical emission properties have therefore been widely investigated to produce efficient emitters integrated on silicon substrates. The material dissimilarity between silicon and III–V materials poses a major challenge to monolithic integration. Recently, direct III–V/Si integration has received renewed interest, boosted by the recent demonstration of high performance III–V quantum dot lasers by direct epitaxial growth on Si. These quantum dot lasers, monolithically grown on Si substrates, provide an alternative to hybrid integration for integrating photonic circuitry on a Si platform.

© 2015 Optical Society of America