One of the major challenges during recent years was to achieve the compatibility of III-V semiconductor epitaxy on silicon substrates to combine opto-electronics with high speed circuit technology. However, the growth of high quality epitaxial GaAs on Si is not straightforward due to the intrinsic differences in lattice parameters and thermal expansion coefficients of the two materials. Moreover, antiphase boundaries (APBs) appear that are disadvantageous for the fabrication of light emitting devices. Recently the successful fabrication of high quality germanium layers on exact (001) Si by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) was reported. Due to the germanium seed layer the lattice parameter is matched to the one of GaAs providing for excellent conditions for the subsequent GaAs growth. We have studied the material morphology of GaAs grown on Ge/Si PS using atomic layer epitaxy (ALE) at the interface between Ge and GaAs. We present results on the reduction of APBs and dislocation density on (001) Ge/Si PS when ALE is applied. The ALE allows the reduction of the residual dislocation density in the GaAs layers to 105 cm−2 (one order of magnitude as compared to the dislocation density of the Ge/Si PS). The optical properties are improved (ie. increased photoluminescence intensity). Using ALE, light emitting diodes based on strained InGaAs/GaAs quantum well as well as of In(Ga)As quantum dots on an exactly oriented (001) Ge/Si pseudo-substrate were fabricated and characterized.