Templated Vapor-Liquid-Solid Epitaxy of III-V Semiconductors on Silicon

Epitaxial growth on silicon remains the most promising method to reduce the cost of optoelectronic-quality III-V semiconductors. Several approaches exist to epitaxially grow III-V material from the vapor phase, but control of 3-D structures remains difficult with these methods. In this work, we present a novel epitaxial growth technique in which photolithography and wet etching are used to establish the geometry of group-III metal, which is then converted to III-V semiconductor by annealing with exposure group-V precursor. The resulting material has been shown to align to the substrate lattice and is optically active, making it a promising approach for III-V PV technologies.