Heterogeneous Integration of Compound Semiconductors

The ability to tailor compound semiconductors and to integrate them onto foreign substrates can lead to superior or novel functionalities with a potential impact on various areas in electronics, optoelectronics, spintronics, biosensing, and photovoltaics. This review provides a brief description of different approaches to achieve this heterogeneous integration, with an emphasis on the ion-cut process, also known commercially as the Smart-Cut^™ process. This process combines semiconductor wafer bonding and undercutting using defect engineering by light ion implantation. Bulk-quality heterostructures frequently unattainable by direct epitaxial growth can be produced, provided that a list of technical criteria is fulfilled, thus offering an additional degree of freedom in the design and fabrication of heterogeneous and flexible devices. Ion cutting is a generic process that can be employed to split and transfer fine monocrystalline layers from various crystals. Materials and engineering issues as well as our current understanding of the underlying physics involved in its application to cleaving thin layers from freestanding GaN, InP, and GaAs wafers are presented.