Investigating the effect of silicon thickness on ultra-thin silicon on insulator as a compliant substrate for gallium arsenide heteroepitaxial growth

Compliant substrates are one of the many promising lattice engineering approaches for hetero-epitaxy. There are many approaches to realize such compliant substrates. Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer is a good option as it is readily available from industry. Previous studies on SOI using silicon thicker than 10 nm on insulator reported limited or no compliance. However, the effect of ultrathin silicon thickness ( 4 nm, the GaAs film is multi-crystalline. These films have been characterized by X-ray diffraction measurement, atomic force microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. These findings show the potential for SOI wafers as compliant substrates at ultrathin Si thicknesses.