10.1117/2.1201206.

004285

Germanium as the unifying

material for silicon photonics
Jurgen Michel and Marco Romagnoli
Germanium, the key enabling material for high-speed photonic links,
can be fully integrated into a silicon CMOS process.
In recent years, high-performance active devices based on
germanium (Ge) have been developed for monolithic integration
into silicon (Si)-based photonic systems. Most of this progress
is based on the development of epitaxial Ge growth directly
on Si.1, 2 The initial Ge-based devices were photodetectors using the high absorption coefficient of Ge up to wavelengths of
about 1550nm. These devices have shown larger than 90% internal quantum efficiencies at 1550nm and bandwidth above
30GHz.3, 4 Today, monolithically integrated Ge photodetectors
are ubiquitous and can be found in active optical cables or fully
integrated with transimpedance amplifiers for telecoms applications.
The next novel Ge-based device was an electro-absorption
modulator that could be based either on the capacitive electrooptical quantum-confined Stark effect5 or the Franz-Keldysh effect in Ge.6 The best performance for a Franz-Keldysh-based
Ge modulator is 30GHz bandwidth7 without resorting to resonant enhancement as required in plasma dispersion-based Si
microring modulators. Both Ge detectors and modulators are integrated with a Si waveguide, resulting in very low capacitance
(of the order of a few femtofarads). If directly integrated with the
analog circuit (driver or transimpedance amplifier), power consumption is reduced to a few tens of femtojoules per bit. That
should be compared with consumption of picojoules per bit in
conventional components based on wire bonding.
We recently demonstrated a Ge-based device, an electrically
pumped laser that can be fully integrated into a Si CMOS
process.8, 9 The lasing in Ge is enabled by strain and n-type
doping to allow dominant direct bandgap recombination in an
indirect semiconductor.
The Ge photodetector is the most advanced Ge-based
photonic device and can already be found integrated with Si
CMOS. Integration of Ge modulators will most likely follow
soon. The Ge laser is the least advanced device, and more

Figure 1. Wavelength performance range for modulators and detectors

using different material compositions. Si: Silicon. Ge: Germanium.

development is necessary to increase its reliability and enable

full CMOS integration.
Integrating all Ge devices into one photonic circuit requires designing a process flow for fabricating the system.
The biggest challenge is to determine the material composition and doping. Strained Ge detectors (0.25%) work best for
wavelengths below 1560nm due to the direct band edge onset at that range. Ge modulators based on the Franz-Keldysh
effect will perform best in the same wavelength range when
adding 0.7% Si in Ge.6 The direct band edge of the materials
would be at about 1480nm. A detector with this particular composition will not be very efficient at absorbing light at 1550nm.
While Ge will do so within 5m, the absorption length for 0.7%
Si in Ge is more than five times longer than for 100% Ge. In
a waveguide configuration, the path length of the detectors
light can be extended without a significant performance penalty,
mainly because the capacitance is still very low due the devices
small size. The benefit of a detector waveguide configuration has
already been demonstrated.3
We grew Ge detectors and modulators in silicon oxide
trenches with a width of 500nm and lengths between 5 and
30m using ultra-high vacuum chemical vapor deposition. We
Continued on next page

10.1117/2.1201206.004285 Page 2/2

added 0.7% Si to the Ge during growth to tune the modulator

response to 1550nm. The Ge devices were fabricated after the
silicide formation but before the back-end-of-line processing.10
We found that limiting the operation range to about 15nm enables use of the same GeSi composition for both modulators
and detectors with a waveguide configuration. Fabrication is
thus achieved in a single Ge process sequence, limiting the thermal budget and simplifying process flow. Figure 1 shows the
wavelength performance range we obtained for modulators and
detectors using different material compositions.
Ge detectors and modulators rely on undoped Ge, but Ge
lasers need high n-type doping for gain. As long as high ntype Ge can only be grown epitaxially (i.e., in layers), simultaneous Ge growth for detectors, modulators, and lasers is not
possible. However, the thermal budget for Ge lasers is significantly lower than that for Ge detectors and modulators due
to the high diffusivity of n-type dopants in Ge, requiring low
process temperatures to prevent out-diffusion.11 Consequently,
it is possible to fabricate Ge lasers after the Ge detectors and
modulators without decreasing their performance. Figure 1 also
shows the measured gain spectrum for n-type Ge with a doping
level of 4  1019 cm 3 . The spectrum spreads over nearly 200nm
and covers the performance range of all GeSi compositions for
detectors and modulators.
In summary, using Ge as a material for the most essential
active photonic components enables development of an integrated, CMOS-compatible process flow without adding new
materials or processes that reduce the yield and reliability of
the final photonic and electronic systems. We have shown how
to fully integrate source, modulation, detection, and electrical
networks in a CMOS-compatible process in which all packaging costs (typically laser, electrical components, and wiring) are
eliminated. The reduced cost, together with energy-efficient design, shows that photonic interconnection is a possible solution
to poor scaling of on-chip wires and I/O bandwidth density for
future technology nodes and promises manufacturability of very
large volume applications.
Our initial feasibility demonstration is a photonic link between a Ge laser and a Ge photodetector. Moving forward, we
will add active and passive photonic devices to show a fully
monolithically integrated link with increasing complexity.

Author Information
Jurgen Michel and Marco Romagnoli
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Cambridge, MA
Jurgen Michel is a senior research scientist in MITs Microphotonics Center. He was formerly at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He
earned his diploma at the University of Cologne and his doctorate and habilitation at the University of Paderborn. He has
co-authored more than 200 refereed scientific papers.
Marco Romagnoli is a visiting scientist at MIT, developing an
optically integrated multiprocessor chip, and director of the
Boston operations of PhotonIC Corp. He has more than 25 years
of experience in the research field, especially in the area of photonic technologies. He holds a physics degree from the University of Rome (La Sapienza). He is the author of more than 160
journal papers and conference contributions, and is an inventor
on more than 40 patents. He is on the technical committee of
major photonics conferences and has served as expert evaluator
for the European Commissions 6th Framework Programme. He
won the Philip Morris prize for optical innovation in 1994.
References
1. L. Colace et al., Ge/Si (001) photodetector for IR light, Solid State Phenom. 54, p. 55,
1997.
2. H. C. Luan et al., High-quality Ge epilayers on Si with low threading-dislocation densities, Appl. Phys. Lett. 75, p. 2909, 1999.
3. J. F. Liu et al., Waveguide-integrated Ge p-i-n photodetectors on a silicon-on-insulator
platform, Opt. Valley China Intl Symp.Optoelectron., pp. 14, 2006.
4. D. Feng et al., High-speed Ge photodetector monolithically integrated with large crosssection silicon-on-insulator waveguide, Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, p. 261105, 2009.
5. Y.-H. Kuo et al., Strong quantum-confined Stark effect in germanium quantum-well
structures on silicon, Nature 437, pp. 13341336, 2005.
6. J. F. Liu et al., Waveguide-integrated, ultra-low energy GeSi electro-absorption modulators, Nat. Photon. 2, p. 433, 2008.
7. N.-N. Feng et al., 30GHz Ge electro-absorption modulator integrated with 3m siliconon-insulator waveguide, Opt. Express 19, p. 7062, 2011.
8. J. Michel et al., An electrically pumped Ge-on-Si laser, Opt. Fiber Commun. Conf.
Exp/Natl Fiber Opt. Eng. Conf., 2012.
9. R. Camacho-Aguilera et al., An electrically pumped germanium laser, Opt. Express
20 (10), p. 11316, 2012.
10. M. A. Beals et al., Process flow innovations for active photonic device integration in
CMOS, Proc. SPIE 6898, p. 689804, 2008. doi:10.1117/12.774576
11. Y. Cai et al., High n-type doped germanium: dopant diffusion and modeling, J. Appl.
Phys. (Accepted for publication.)

c 2012 SPIE