• DOI:10.1038/srep03225
• Corpus ID: 18439825

A self-assembled microbonded germanium/silicon heterojunction photodiode for 25 Gb/s high-speed optical interconnects

@article{Tseng2013ASM,
  title={A self-assembled microbonded germanium/silicon heterojunction photodiode for 25 Gb/s high-speed optical interconnects},
  author={C. K. Tseng and Wei-Ting Chen and Ku-Hung Chen and Han-din Liu and Yimin Kang and N. Na and Ming-Chang M. Lee},
  journal={Scientific Reports},
  year={2013},
  volume={3}
}

• C. Tseng, Wei-Ting Chen, +4 authors Ming-Chang M. Lee
• Published 15 November 2013
• Physics
• Scientific Reports

A novel technique using surface tension to locally bond germanium (Ge) on silicon (Si) is presented for fabricating high performance Ge/Si photodiodes. Surface tension is a cohesive force among liquid molecules that tends to bring contiguous objects in contact to maintain a minimum surface energy. We take advantage of this phenomenon to fabricate a heterojunction optoelectronic device where the lattice constants of joined semiconductors are different. A high-speed Ge/Si heterojunction waveguide photodiode is presented by microbonding a beam-shaped Ge, first grown by rapid-melt-growth (RMG) method, on top of a Si waveguide via surface tension. Excellent device performances such as an operating bandwidth of 17 GHz and a responsivity of 0.66 and 0.70 A/W at the reverse bias of −4 and −6 V, respectively, are demonstrated. This technique can be simply implemented via modern complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication technologies for integrating Ge on Si devices.