Large scale PICs in III-Vs-unique problems and opportunities

The last 5 years have been an extremely exciting time for semiconductor device physics. Advances in growth techniques and substrate quality have allowed monolayer abrupt structures with high degrees of thickness and compositional uniformity over large areas to become routine. The introduction of strain has taught us a great deal about the band structure of semiconductors as well as enabling us to greatly improve active device performance. The techniques of selective area growth and etching now provide a technological platform for photonic integration that has yielded record breaking research devices as well as commercial products in a very short time. Clever designs using all of the above are creating easily packaged components and subsystems which can lower the cost of photonics to a degree that makes them accessible to every area of communication. In this paper we review a number of recent milestones and examine the opportunities and challenges to photonic integration for the future.