Heterogeneous integration of III-V based photonics with silicon

III-V based devices have provided unsurpassed performance enabling the rapid advancement of data-communications over the past decades. Yet the integration of these components is still primitive leading to high costs due to the packaging challenges. Heterogeneous integration using controlled release of the essential device layers from individual source wafers and engineered parallel transfer to a common platform is a very promising approach as it takes the best materials and devices, produced in a conventional foundry environment, to produce powerful photonic circuits on target waveguiding platforms such as silicon-on-insulator. The devices can be pre- or post-processed and optically integrated to the silicon waveguides using butt, evanescent or potentially grating coupling. Laser devices are the most critical since they cannot easily be realized in Si. We demonstrate the transfer of lasers based on InP quantum wells where the devices are bonded by van der Waals forces. We have also demonstrated the release and transfer of silicon microcircuits, GaN materials and dielectric layers. We study the interface property between the transferred materials (e.g. InP) and the target wafer (Si). There is an improvement in device performance after the transfer due to the high thermal conductivity of Si. This approach will allow more sophisticated circuits due to the ease of including multi-wavelength lasers as well as modulating and detecting functions along with specialty materials such as potentially lithium niobate or magnetic materials. The technique enables close integration of photonics with electronics platforms and thus a route to widespread consumer applications for III-V devices.