BATCH FABRICATION AND OPERATION OF GAAS-A1XGA1-XAS FIELD-EFFECT TRANSISTOR-SELF-ELECTROOPTIC EFFECT DEVICE (FET-SEED) SMART PIXEL ARRAYS

We have fabricated and operated arrays of integrated field-effect transistor-self-electrooptic effect devices (FET-SEED's) consisting of doped-channel field-effect transistors, multiple quantum-well (MQW) modulators, and p-i-n MQW detectors. This technology provides, for the first time, the ability to design and fabricate arbitrarily chosen optoelectronic circuits containing FET's and SEED's in a high yield process on full wafers. The performance of the FET's and SEED's such as g(m) and contrast, is entirely equivalent to that which is obtained when they are made separately. Typical values are g(m) = 80 mS/mm and contrast of 3. The largest present arrays contain 128 circuits. These circuits have been operated at speeds as fast as 500 Mb/s (signal source limited) with optical input switching energy of almost-equal-to 400 fj. At 170 Mb/s the required optical input switching energy is almost-equal-to 70 fj. This optical energy is at least a factor of 20 less than for symmetric SEED's (S-SEED's) with the same optical window sizes. Hence FET-SEED's provide superior performance compared to conventional S-SEED's. We believe that the integration of electronic circuits with SEED modulators can avoid many of the present limitations of electronics due to wiring complexity, crosstalk, parasitics, and clock skew.