Towards fully monolithic silicon-based integrated photonics: MOCVD grown lasers on silicon by blanket and selective area heteroepitaxy

Direct epitaxial integration of III-V lasers on Si offers substantial manufacturing cost and scalability advantages. We present our work towards fully monolithic active/passive Si photonics integration by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) heteroepitaxy. 1.55 µm InP-based Fabry-Perot (FP) lasers on Si by blanket heteroepitaxy are firstly demonstrated, achieving electrically pumped continuous-wave (CW) lasing exceeding 65°C. Aging test shows a stable operation after 200 hours. As a compelling candidate for lasers on Si by virtue of their defect-forgiving nature, InAs/GaAs quantum dot (QD) lasers are then presented. Threshold current as low as 8 mA and high single-facet output power of 200 mW are obtained for devices on GaAs. The QD photoluminescence on Si exhibits the same intensity and full-width half-maximum as on GaAs. At last, we discuss the perspectives on fully integrated III-V/Si photonics by selective area heteroepitaxy (SAH) and present high-quality GaAs-based materials selectively grown in 7 µm ~ 30 µm wide recessed SiO2 on Si. A low defect density of 8.5×106 cm-2 is achieved for the GaAs buffer and the subsequently grown GaAs/InGaAs multi-quantum-well (MQW) microdisk lasers (MDLs) are demonstrating room-temperature lasing under optical pulsed pumping.