Transforming photodiode into avalanche photodiode: An efficient method improving the sensitivity performance of foundry-fabricated Si/Ge receiver
Abstract
Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are essential semiconductor optoelectronic devices that could effectively improve the optical receiver sensitivity due to the internal gain. Based on Si/Ge photodiodes (PDs) from standard foundry process design kits, this work demonstrates a simple tuning method to transform PDs into APDs and further improve optical receiver sensitivity by carefully increasing the bias voltage before breakdown. The tuning principle is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. A useful method distinguishing whether a foundry-fabricated PD can be tuned to the APD is proposed via confirming if the tunneling breakdown happens before avalanche. Subsequently, based on the foundry-fabricated Si/Ge PD, the receiver sensitivity is improved by 5 dB via increasing bias voltage from 2 to 12 V under the non-return-to-zero bit rate of 10 Gbps, at the incident power of −16 dBm and gain of 3 the bit error rate is suppressed by eight orders of magnitude.
Article Details
Journal Info
Journal of Applied Physics
American Institute of Physics
Authors (21)
Beichen Liu
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Yinjie Liu
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Jizhe Zhao
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Jiyuan Zheng
Rui Wu
Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Yubo Yang
Xiayang Hua
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Xiaoran Wang
State Key Laboratory of Microbial Technology, Institute of Microbial Technology
Anran Guo
Department of Solid State Image Sensor, CETC No. 44 Research Institute, CETC Chips Technology Group Co., Ltd. 3 , Chongqing 401332,
Boyi Yu
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Xiaoyu Feng
Yongpan Liu
Zhibiao Hao
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 2 , Beijing 100084,
Hongtao Li
Yanjun Han
State Key Laboratory of Widegap Semiconductor Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University 1 , Beijing 100084,
Jian Wang
Bing Xiong
Changzheng Sun
Lin Gan
Yi Luo
State Key Laboratory of Green Chemical Engineering and Industrial Catalysis
Lai Wang