Moreover, as they showed in the paper “Direct bandgap emission from hexagonal germanium and silicon-germanium alloys” published in the journal Nature, they were able to. The radiation wavelength is continuously adjustable over a wide range. According to them, these new discoveries could allow the development of photonic chips directly in silicon-germanium integrated circuits.
The key to converting SiGe alloys into direct bandgap emitters is to obtain germanium and germanium-silicon alloys with a hexagonal lattice structure. Researchers at the Technical University of Eindhoven, together with colleagues from the Technical University of Munich and the universities of Jena and Linz, used nanowires made from a different material as templates for hexagonal growth.
The nanowires then serve as templates for a germanium-silicon shell onto which the underlying material imposes a hexagonal crystal structure. Initially, however, these structures could not be excited to emit light. After exchanging ideas with colleagues at the Walther Schottky Institute at the Technical University of Munich, they analyzed the optical properties of each generation and eventually optimized the manufacturing process to the point where the nanowires could actually emit light.
“At the same time, we have achieved performance almost comparable to indium phosphide or gallium arsenide,” says Prof. Erik Bakkers from Eindhoven University of Technology. Therefore, the creation of lasers based on germanium-silicon alloys that can be integrated into conventional manufacturing processes may only be a matter of time.
“If we could optically provide internal and inter-chip electronic communication, the speed could be increased by a factor of 1,000,” said Jonathan Finley, professor of semiconductor quantum nanosystems at TUM. can significantly reduce the number of laser radars, chemical sensors for medical diagnostics, and chips for measuring air and food quality.”
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Post time: Jun-21-2023