Improving optical coupling in monolithically integrated lasers on silicon by selective area growth

The direct growth of III-V lasers on silicon has the potential to allow for low-cost production of silicon photonic integrated circuits on a 300 mm wafer-scale. However, coupling loss severely limits the performance in current implementations of direct growth processes due to the growth of undesirable polycrystalline material on silicon dioxide sidewalls. In this work, we report the use of selective area molecular beam epitaxy growth to reduce the formation of this polycrystalline material during the growth process and improve the coupling efficiency. Furthermore, we demonstrate electrically pumped continuous wave lasers directly grown on foundry-fabricated silicon photonic integrated circuit wafers using this technique.