High-Speed Widely-Tunable >90% Quantum-Efficiency Resonant Cavity Enhanced p-i-n Photodiodes
Abstract
High-speed, high-efficiency photodetectors play an important role in optical communication and measurement systems. Both Schottky photodiode and p-i-n photodiode offer a high-speed performance to fulfill the needs of such high-speed systems. However, the efficiency of these detectors have been typically limited to less than 10%, mostly due to the thin absorption region needed for short transit times. One can increase the absorption region thickness to achieve higher efficiencies. But this also means longer transit times that will degrade the high-speed performance of the devices. Resonant cavity enhanced (RCE) photodetectors potentially offer the possibility of overcoming this limitation of the bandwidth-efficiency product of conventional photodetectors. The RCE detectors are based on the enhancement of the optical field within a FabryPerot resonant cavity. The increased field allows the usage of thin absorbing layers, which minimizes the transit time of the photo-carriers without hampering the quantum efficiency. High-speed RCE photodetector research has mainly concentrated on using p-i-n type photodiodes, where near 100% quantum efficiencies along with a 3-dB bandwidth of 17 GHz have been reported [6]. Recently, we have fabricated RCE type Schottky photodiodes with 50% quantum efficiency, and a 50 GHz frequency performance. In this paper, we report our work on design, fabrication, and testing of widely tunable high-speed RCE p-i-n photodiodes for operation around 820 nm.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1998
- Accession Number
- ADA598128
Entities
People
- D. H. Christensen
- Ekmel Ozbay
- Gokhan Ulu
- Ibrahim Kimukin
- M. S. Ünlü
- Mutlu Gokkavas
- Necmi Biyikli
- Orhan Aytur
- R. Mirin
Organizations
- Boston University