Abstract
This paper presents our recent progress on fast germanium photodetector (PD) development for our 3μm silicon-on - insulator (SOI) platform. We have fabricated a horizontal PIN photodiode, which has a 3dB cutoff frequency of 40GHz and responsivity of 1.0 A/W at -1V bias for operation wavelength of 1.55μm. The high bandwidth indicates that the detector speed is limited by the transit time of the carriers over the i-region rather than the junction capacitance. The electric field in the i-region at -1V is high enough to maintain the carrier drift speed close to the maximum velocity of carriers in the Ge. The device is realized using selectively grown germanium with very low amount of stress induced crystal defects. The detector area and the Si waveguides were patterned with a common hard mask, which enables accurate lateral alignment between them. The n- and p-contacts were directly made on the Ge using Ti/Al metallization. The vertical sidewalls of the detector area were implanted in order to create the horizontal PIN structure. The subsequent dopant diffusion was estimated to secure the i-region and the junctions by controlling the thermal budget, as the two dopants have different diffusion mechanism in Ge. One of the advantages of our micron scale waveguides is that due to the high confinement of the optical mode within the Si waveguide they allow light coupling into a short detector. The junction capacitances are therefore small as the detector area is only 1x9μm. In addition, the electrical output pulse shape is not distorted by the slow diffusion current of electrons and holes as the incoming light do not overlap the doped n- and n-regions.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Silicon Photonics XV |
Editors | Graham T. Reed, Andrew P. Knights |
Publisher | International Society for Optics and Photonics SPIE |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-5106-3333-9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
MoE publication type | A4 Article in a conference publication |
Event | Silicon Photonics XV 2020 - San Francisco, United States Duration: 3 Feb 2020 → 6 Feb 2020 |
Publication series
Series | Proceedings of SPIE |
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Volume | 11285 |
ISSN | 0277-786X |
Conference
Conference | Silicon Photonics XV 2020 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | San Francisco |
Period | 3/02/20 → 6/02/20 |
Funding
This work was carried out in the RAPSI and OPEC projects, which were funded by Business Finland (formerly Tekes), the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (grant agreement numbers 922/31/2018 and 2814/31/2015, respectively).
Keywords
- Ge-detector
- PIN photodetector
- Silicon photonics
- Silicon-on-insulator
- SOI