Heterogeneous integration of Silicon-Photonic Integrated circuits by Transfer Printing

With the rapid growth in demand of high-performance functionality of integrated circuits for faster data speed, higher data capacity, low power consumption, the co-integration of electronics with photonic devices made from different materials are required to be achievable in a practical and scalable approach. The challenge is to combine functional components that are optimally fabricated on specific non-silicon substrates to silicon-photonic integrated circuit. As the further increased requirements for smaller area, lower power consumption, and higher bandwidth density, the single material and discrete integration method are hard to meet the demand. Heterogeneous integration is the most promising way to over the limit of materials, fabrication process and function integrity of the photonic-electronic integrated circuits to improve the performance in photonic, electronics and system level. Transfer printing is one of the disruptive techniques to achieve the wafer scale implementation of photonic-electronics integrated circuit. In our work, we demonstrate the heterogeneous integration process of III-V photodetectors on silicon photonic integrated circuits through transfer-printing. A single channel of integrated receiver reaches 42 GHz of 3 dB bandwidth at-2 V reverse bias, showing a polarization-independent responsivity up to 1 A/W.