Abstract
The remarkable progress in silicon photonics towards the integration of electronic and photonic integrated circuits including high performance waveguides [1], photodetectors [2] and modulators [3] might be the key for the solution of the emerging power consumption crisis in CMOS technology. The vision is to replace metal interconnects with optical interconnects for the on-chip or chip-to-chip data transfer. However, the missing piece is a group IV laser source. Group IV semiconductors, such as Si and Ge, are inefficient light emitters due to their fundamental indirect band gap: for the electron-hole recombination process, in order to preserve momentum, phonons are required and to occupy the efficient Γ-states (in the case of Ge) high carrier injection densities and/or high n-doping is needed. However, in group IV, by alloying Ge with Sn, a direct band gap semiconductor can be obtained [4,5] which would dramatically improve the emission properties. This transition to a fundamental direct band gap occurs for Sn concentrations in the range of 10 at.%. Recent progress in low temperature GeSn epitaxy, as shown, enables the growth of such GeSn layers and the realization of a laser device [6].
© 2015 IEEE
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