Selective Area Growth of Semiconductor Structures by MOCVD for Telecommunication Applications

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Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) promise to drive down the cost and increase the performance of the vital components and systems that enable the optical communications network, which forms the backbone of our modern telecommunications system. Just as the integrated circuit did for electronics, PICs reduce the cost by reducing the number of fabrication steps, improving yield and enabling economies of scale through batch fabrication. There are two general approaches to photonic integration; hybrid integration, where devices are separately fabricated and assembled, and monolithic integration, where all devices are fabricated together on a single chip. In hybrid integration, the composite devices are well-optimized; however, the integration of devices is daunting and expensive, due to the need for alignment of devices on a sub-micron scale, and the serious reliability issues that ensue. Monolithic integration for photonic circuits solves the packaging problem by design, but is far more complex than for electronic circuits due to the wide variety of devices to be integrated and the different materials systems that are separately optimized for each device. In particular, modern PICs require components that operate at different wavelengths in order to take advantage of the vast bandwidth afforded by optical fibers, through wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). An elegant approach to fabricating different wavelength lasers on a single chip is selective area growth (SAG), where the composition and thickness of epitaxial III-V semiconductor layers grown by metallo-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) can be carefully controlled by varying the dimensions of a masking layer. As a result, multiple wavelength lasers can be grown simultaneously on a single chip. In this project, we will develop new SAG processes using the MOCVD at McMaster University to provide single-growth multi-wavelength laser structures to the current photonic integration platform in use by ArtIC Photonics.