Due to the extraordinary electron mobility, III-V compounds are considered as the ideal candidate channel materials for future electronic devices. In this study, a novel approach for the fabrication of high-crystalline quality GaAs-on-insulator has been proposed by integrating of ion-cut and selective chemical etching. GaAs layer with good crystalline quality has been epitaxially grown on Ge by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). With H implantation and wafer bonding process, the GaAs/Ge heterostructure is transferred onto silicon dioxide wafer after the proper thermal treatment. Superior to the direct ion-cut of GaAs layer, which requires the H implantation fluence as high as 2.0 x 10(17) cm(-2), the transfer of GaAs/Ge heterostructure in the present study only needs the implantation of 0.8 x 10(17) cm(-2) H ions. GaAs-on-insulator structure was successfully achieved by the selective chemical etching of defective Ge layer using SF6 plasma. As the GaAs/Ge heterostructure can be easily epitaxy grown on silicon platform, the proposed approach for GaAs-on-insulator manufacturing is rather compatible with mature Si integrated circuits (ICs) technology and thus can be integrated to push the microelectronic technology to post-Si era. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.