Germanium on silicon to enable integrated photonic circuits

F. Kenneth Hopkins; Kevin M. Walsh; Alexander Benken; John Jones; Kent Averett; Darnell E. Diggs; Loon-Seng Tan; Shin Mou; James G. Grote

doi:10.1117/12.2025186

24 September 2013 Germanium on silicon to enable integrated photonic circuits

F. Kenneth Hopkins, Kevin M. Walsh, Alexander Benken, John Jones, Kent Averett, Darnell E. Diggs, Loon-Seng Tan, Shin Mou, James G. Grote

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8876, Nanophotonics and Macrophotonics for Space Environments VII; 88760X (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2025186
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2013, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Electronic circuits alone cannot fully meet future requirements for speed, size, and weight of many sensor systems, such as digital radar technology and as a result, interest in integrated photonic circuits (IPCs) and the hybridization of electronics with photonics is growing. However, many IPC components such as photodetectors are not presently ideal, but germanium has many advantages to enable higher performance designs that can be better incorporated into an IPC. For example, Ge photodetectors offer an enormous responsivity to laser wavelengths near 1.55μm at high frequencies to 40GHz, and they can be easily fabricated as part of a planar silicon processing schedule. At the same time, germanium has enormous potential for enabling 1.55 micron lasers on silicon and for enhancing the performance of silicon modulators. Our new effort has begun by studying the deposition of germanium on silicon and beginning to develop methods for processing these films. In initial experiments comparing several common chemical solutions for selective etching under patterned positive photoresist, it was found that hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) at or below room temperature (20 C) produced the sharpest patterns in the Ge films; H₂O₂ at a higher temperature (50 C) resulted in the greatest lateral etching.

Citation Download Citation

F. Kenneth Hopkins, Kevin M. Walsh, Alexander Benken, John Jones, Kent Averett, Darnell E. Diggs, Loon-Seng Tan, Shin Mou, and James G. Grote "Germanium on silicon to enable integrated photonic circuits", Proc. SPIE 8876, Nanophotonics and Macrophotonics for Space Environments VII, 88760X (24 September 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2025186

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