GaAs nano-ridge laser diodes fully fabricated in a 300 mm CMOS pilot line
Silicon photonics is a rapidly developing technology that promises to revolutionize the way we communicate, compute, and sense the world. However, the lack of highly scalable, native CMOS-integrated light sources is one of the main factors hampering its widespread adoption. Despite significant progress in hybrid and heterogeneous integration of III-V light sources on silicon, monolithic integration by direct epitaxial growth of III-V materials remains the pinnacle in realizing cost-effective on-chip light sources. Here, we report the first electrically driven GaAs-based multi-quantum-well laser diodes fully fabricated on 300 mm Si wafers in a CMOS pilot manufacturing line. GaAs nano-ridge waveguides with embedded p-i-n diodes, InGaAs quantum wells and InGaP passivation layers are grown with high quality at wafer scale, leveraging selective-area epitaxy with aspect-ratio trapping. After III-V facet patterning and standard CMOS contact metallization, room-temperature continuous-wave lasing is demonstrated at wavelengths around 1020 nm in more than three hundred devices across a wafer, with threshold currents as low as 5 mA, output powers beyond 1 mW, laser linewidths down to 46 MHz, and laser operation up to 55 °C. These results illustrate the potential of the III-V/Si nano-ridge engineering concept for the monolithic integration of laser diodes in a Si photonics platform, enabling future cost-sensitive high-volume applications in optical sensing, interconnects and beyond.