Waveguide coupled III-V photodiodes monolithically integrated on Si.

Wen, Pengyan; Tiwari, Preksha; Mauthe, Svenja; Schmid, Heinz; Sousa, Marilyne; Scherrer, Markus; Baumann, Michael; Bitachon, Bertold Ian et al. · Nat Commun · 2022

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The seamless integration of III-V nanostructures on silicon is a long-standing goal and an important step towards integrated optical links. In the present work, we demonstrate scaled and waveguide coupled III-V photodiodes monolithically integrated on Si, implemented as InP/In<sub>0.5</sub>Ga<sub>0.5</sub>As/InP p-i-n heterostructures. The waveguide coupled devices show a dark current down to 0.048 A/cm<sup>2</sup> at -1 V and a responsivity up to 0.2 A/W at -2 V. Using grating couplers centered around 1320 nm, we demonstrate high-speed detection with a cutoff frequency f<sub>3dB</sub> exceeding 70 GHz and data reception at 50 GBd with OOK and 4PAM. When operated in forward bias as a light emitting diode, the devices emit light centered at 1550 nm. Furthermore, we also investigate the self-heating of the devices using scanning thermal microscopy and find a temperature increase of only ~15 K during the device operation as emitter, in accordance with thermal simulation results.