Transferrable AlGaN/GaN High-Electron Mobility Transistors to Arbitrary Substrates via a Two-Dimensional Boron Nitride Release Layer

Mechanical transfer of high-performing thin-film devices onto arbitrary substrates represents an exciting opportunity to improve device performance, explore nontraditional manufacturing approaches, and paves the way for soft, conformal, and flexible electronics. Using a two-dimensional boron nitride release layer, we demonstrate the transfer of AlGaN/GaN high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) to arbitrary substrates through both direct van der Waals bonding and with a polymer adhesive interlayer. No device degradation was observed because of the transfer process, and a significant reduction in device temperature (327-132 °C at 600 mW) was observed when directly bonded to a silicon carbide (SiC) wafer relative to the starting wafer. With the use of a benzocyclobutene (BCB) adhesion interlayer, devices were easily transferred and characterized on Kapton and ceramic films, representing an exciting opportunity for integration onto arbitrary substrates. Upon reduction of this polymer adhesive layer thickness, the AlGaN/GaN HEMTs transferred onto a BCB/SiC substrate resulted in comparable peak temperatures during operation at powers as high as 600 mW to the as-grown wafer, revealing that by optimizing interlayer characteristics such as thickness and thermal conductivity, transferrable devices on polymer layers can still improve performance outputs.

Bonding III-V material to SOI with transparent and conductive ZnO film at low temperature

A procedure of bonding III-V material to SOI at low temperature using conductive and transparent adhesive ZnO as intermediate layer is demonstrated. Bonding layer thickness of less than 100 nm was achieved in our experiment that guaranteed good light coupling efficiency between III-V and silicon. This bonding method showed good bonding strength with shear stress of 80 N/cm(2). The lowest resistance of the bonded samples was 48.9 Ω and the transmittance of the spin-coated ZnO layer was above 99%. This procedure is applicable for fabricating hybrid III-V/Si lasers.

Excitability in optically injected microdisk lasers with phase controlled excitatory and inhibitory response

We demonstrate class I excitability in optically injected microdisk lasers, and propose a possible optical spiking neuron design. The neuron has a clear threshold and an integrating behavior, leading to an output rate-input rate dependency that is comparable to the characteristic of sigmoidal artificial neurons. We also show that the optical phase of the input pulses has influence on the neuron response, and can be used to create inhibitory, as well as excitatory perturbations.

Integrated interferometric approach to solve microring resonance splitting in biosensor applications

Silicon-on-insulator microring resonators have proven to be an excellent platform for label-free nanophotonic biosensors. The high index contrast of silicon-on-insulator allows for fabrication of micrometer-size sensors. However, it also limits the quality of the resonances by introducing an intrinsic mode-splitting. Backscattering of optical power at small waveguide variations lifts the degeneracy of the normal resonator modes. This severely deteriorates the quality of the output signal, which is of utmost importance to determine the performance of the microrings as a biosensor. We suggest an integrated interferometric approach to give access to the unsplit, high-quality normal modes of the microring resonator and experimentally show an improvement of the quality factor by a factor of 3.