PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | March 14, 2016
Proc. SPIE. 9752, Silicon Photonics XI
KEYWORDS: Wafer-level optics, Light sources, Gallium arsenide, Silicon, Semiconductor lasers, Integrated circuits, Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers, Silicon photonics, Data communications, Optical interconnects, Virtual colonoscopy, Hybrid silicon lasers
Advancement of silicon photonics technology can offer a new dimension in data communications with un-precedent bandwidth. Increasing the integration level in the silicon photonics is required to develop compact high-performance chip-level optical interconnects for future systems. Especially, monolithic integration of light source on a silicon wafer is important for future silicon photonic integrated circuits, since realizing a compact on-chip light source on a silicon wafer is a serious issue which impedes practical implementation of the silicon photonic interconnects. At present, due to the lack of a practical light source based on Group IV elements, flip chip-bonded or packaged lasers based on III–V semiconductor are usually being used as external light sources, to feed silicon modulators on SOI wafers to complete a photonic transmitter, except the reported silicon hybrid lasers monolithic-integrated on SOI wafers. To overcome above problem, we have proposed a compact on-chip light source, the directly monolithic-integrated VCSEL on a bulk silicon wafer (VCSEL-on-Si), based on the transplanted epitaxial film by substrate lift-off process and following device-fabrication on the bulk Si wafer. This can offer practical low-power-consumption light sources integrated on a silicon wafer, which can provide a complete chip-level I/O set when combined with monolithic-integrated vertical-illumination Ge-on-Si photodetectors on the same silicon wafer. In this work, we report the characterization of direct-modulation VCSELs-on-Si for λ ~850 nm with CW optical output power > ~2 mW and the threshold current < ~3 mA, over 10 Gb/s operations. We also discuss about the thermal characteristics of the VCSELs-on-Si.
