This paper discusses the potential of GeSn semiconductors as versatile building blocks for manufacturable silicon-integrated mid-infrared photonic and optoelectronic devices. This wavelength range is highly attractive to implement a variety of applications including heat harvesting, spectroscopy, free-space and fiber-optical communications, surveillance and recognition, remote biochemical sensing, and medical imaging. Challenges related to the wafer-level epitaxial growth of these metastable semiconductors on silicon will be addressed and their atomic-level properties will be discussed. Furthermore, their integration in device processing will also be presented. Examples including lasers, light-emitting diodes, high-speed photodetectors, and thermophotovoltaic cells operating in the mid-infrared range will be described and their performance discussed.
|