Heterogeneous Integration of III–V Materials by Direct Wafer Bonding for High-Performance Electronics and Optoelectronics

III-V materials, such as InGaAs and InP, are highly attractive for high-performance electronics and optoelectronics owning to their high carrier mobilities and potential for bandgap engineering. Integration on silicon substrates, however, is a key requirement to enable widespread adoption of these materials. In this work, direct wafer bonding (DWB) of III-V materials is explored as a low-temperature enabling technology for Si integration. For high-performance logic and RF electronics, DWB is compared to competing integration technologies and is shown to exhibit higher device performance due to its relatively low process complexity and thermal impact (~300 °C). Due to the low thermal impact of DWB, it is also uniquely suitable for 3-D integration, i.e., vertical stacking of multiple functional layers. III-V optoelectronics are attractive in such 3-D stacks, where they can enable high-efficiency tunable lasers together with Si photonics integrated circuits. DWB is here compared to selective epitaxy as an integration route for InP-on-Si microdisk lasers. Plasmonics are explored as well, allowing scaling of integrated III-V photonic devices beyond the diffraction limit of light. The results of this work show that DWB is a highly promising integration route for III-V materials for both electronics and optoelectronics applications.