Transfer Printing for Silicon Photonics

Silicon-based photonics allows thousands of optical components to be integrated. It provides a path to the development of scalable, low-cost photonic integrated circuits akin to electronics enabling many applications in communications, medical, and sensing. Waveguides, multiplexing, and routing are straightforwardly implemented. While integrated detection and modulation can be implemented for certain wavelength ranges, functional performance across the full optical spectrum requires separately optimized components. In addition, to enable integrated lasers, the key component of a III–V semiconductor gain block is required. Microtransfer printing is emerging as an effective, accurate, and massively parallel technique to address these issues through the heterogeneous integration of optimized photonic materials and devices. We describe some recent developments in this emerging technology as applied to silicon-based photonics.