Monolithic optoelectronic circuit design and fabrication by epitaxial growth on commercial VLSI GaAs MESFET´s

A technique for realizing large-scale monolithic OEIC´s, which involves epitaxially growing GaAs-based heterostructures on fully metallized commercial VLSI GaAs MESFET integrated circuits, has recently been reported. In the initial work the circuits and LED´s occupied distinct halves of a chip, the dielectric growth window was wet-etched after circuit fabrication, and the LED´s required both n and p ohmic contacts to be formed after epitaxial growth. In this letter we report the use of standard foundry process etches to open dielectric growth windows intermixed with circuitry and the growth of n-side-down LED´s on a source/drain ion-implanted n/sup +/ region serving as the n ohmic contact. A winner-take-all neural circuit is demonstrated using these advances, which are important steps toward realizing higher levels of circuit integration.<>