​By Nicolas Pauc
Silicon Nanoelectronics Photonics and Structures Team (SiNaPS)

In the large family of semiconductors, the elements of the IV column hold a place of choice in digital technologies. Even if other materials potentially offer a better alternative when it comes to using light for information processing, nothing has stopped the development and improvement of these technologies on the silicon platform until now. In these conditions, the absence of any monolithically integrated light source has long been considered as an obstacle to the development of components mixing photonics and electronics on this material. In this presentation, I will review past research aiming at radically transforming the band diagram of germanium nanostructures, in the form of microwires or epitaxial layers on Si, using lattice deformation engineering, in order to have a direct fundamental band gap IV semiconductor. With the progress in crystal growth, we will see in a second step that this configuration can now be obtained on a new family of group IV alloys, of the SiGeSn type, and this without the assistance of deformation. This remarkable characteristic opens many perspectives, among which the realization of infrared laser sources operating at high temperature, in a CMOS compatible die. After having described our first results and achievements in this field, we will give several prospective avenues opened by this new class of alloys for optics and electronics on Si.