Abstract High-speed optical interconnects of data centers and high performance computers (HPC) have become the rapid development direction in the field of optical communication owing to the explosive growth of market demand. Currently, optical interconnect systems are moving towards higher capacity and integration. High-sensitivity receivers with avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are paid more attention due to the capability to enhance gain bandwidth. The impact ionization coefficient ratio is one crucial parameter for avalanche photodiode optimization, which significantly affects the excess noise and the gain bandwidth product (GBP). The development of silicon-germanium (Si-Ge) APDs are promising thanks to the low impact ionization coefficient ratio of silicon, the simple structure, and the CMOS compatible process. Separate absorption charge multiplication (SACM) structures are typically adopted in Si-Ge APDs to achieve high bandwidth and low noise. This paper reviews design and optimization in high-speed Si-Ge APDs, including advanced APD structures, APD modeling and APD receivers. 

/pdf/high-speed-si-ge-avalanche-photodiodes-2am84myu.pdf

High-speed Si-Ge avalanche photodiodes

Silicon photonics technology has drawn significant interest due to its potential for compact and high-performance photonic integrated circuits. The Ge- or III–V material-based avalanche photodiodes integrated on silicon photonics provide ideal high sensitivity optical receivers for telecommunication wavelengths. Herein, the last advances of monolithic and heterogeneous avalanche photodiodes on silicon are reviewed, including different device structures and semiconductor systems.

Avalanche photodiodes on silicon photonics

InP-based avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are widely used in short-wave infrared (SWIR) communications. In this work, a thin (200 nm nominal) InAlAs digital alloy layer consisting of two monolayer (ML) InAs and two ML AlAs was grown on InP substrate and investigated in detail. APDs with p-i-n and n-i-p structures were fabricated and characterized. The current-voltage, capacitance-voltage characteristics, and excess noise were measured at room temperature with different laser wavelengths, and the measured effective k value (ratio of impact ionization coefficients) is about 0.15 with the multiplication gain up to 12. The randomly-generated path length (RPL) model was carried out to analyze the dead space effect. Our thin digital alloy successfully reduced excess noise compared with conventional In0.52Al0.48As random alloy without introducing new elements and shows the potential for high-speed, low noise APD applications.

Characteristics of thin InAlAs digital alloy avalanche photodiodes

The well-known analytical formula for the excess noise factor associated with avalanche photodiodes (APDs), developed by R. J. McIntyre in 1966, assumes the injection of either an electron or a hole at the edge of the APD's avalanche region. This formula is based on the statistics of the probabilities of carriers gaining and losing energy subject to high electric fields. However, this analytical formula, is not applicable in cases when photons are absorbed inside the avalanche region (even though the physics of the high field transport remains the same), and its use may severely underestimate or overestimate the actual excess noise factor depending on the absorption profile and the hole-to-electron ionization coefficient ratio, k . Here, an easy-to-use exact analytical formula is derived for the excess noise factor of APDs while taking into account a mixed-carrier initiated avalanche multiplication process, which is triggered by a parent electron-hole pair at an arbitrarily specified location within the multiplication region. The derivation relies on analytically solving a special case of a previously reported recursive integral equations [Hayat et al. , IEEE Trans. Electron Devices, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 546–552, Mar. 1992.], and the result matches the formula reported by McIntyre in 1999 using a different and limited technique. In addition, an expression for the excess noise factor is presented in the case when the location of the parent electron-hole pair within the multiplication region obeys an arbitrary exponential distribution. The results show that in contrast to the case of edge parent-electron injection, when mixed injection is allowed even a small level of hole ionization (e.g., small k ∼ 0.0001) causes the excess noise factor to increase dramatically, depending on the absorption profile as it ranges from narrow to flat within the multiplication region. The theoretical results are validated against experimental results for Si APDs.

Exact Analytical Formula for the Excess Noise Factor for Mixed Carrier Injection Avalanche Photodiodes

Interface electric field confinement effect of high-sensitivity lateral Ge/Si avalanche photodiodes

Simple, approximate formulas are developed to calculate the mean gain and excess noise factor for avalanche photodiodes using the dead-space multiplication theory in the regime of small multiplication width and high applied electric field. The accuracy of the approximation is investigated by comparing it to the exact numerical method using recursive coupled integral equations and it is found that it works for dead spaces up to 15% of the multiplication width, which is substantial. The approximation is also tested for real materials such as GaAs, InP and Si for various multiplication widths, and the results found are accurate within ∼ 15% of the actual noise, which is a significant improvement over the local-theory noise formula. The results obtained for the mean gain also confirm the recently reported relationship between experimentally determined local ionization coefficients and the enabled non-local ionization coefficients.

/pdf/on-the-analytical-formulation-of-excess-noise-in-avalanche-4xqoihwxmj.pdf

On the analytical formulation of excess noise in avalanche photodiodes with dead space

Si-Ge lateral avalanche photodiodes (Si-Ge LAPDs) are promising devices for single photon detection, but they also have technology challenges. Si-Ge LAPDs are CMOS compatible and capable of detecting photons near the 1550 nm telecommunications bands. However, the Si-Ge LAPD exhibits a unique avalanche multiplication process in silicon, where the electrons and holes follow curved paths in three-dimensional space. Traditional models for the analysis of the avalanche multiplication process assume one-dimensional paths for the carriers that undergo the chains of impact ionizations; therefore, they are not suitable for analyzing the avalanche properties of Si-Ge LAPDs. In this paper, the statistics of the avalanche process in the Si-Ge LAPD are modeled analytically using a method that was recently developed by our group for understanding the avalanche multiplication in nanopillar, core-shell GaAs avalanche photodiodes, for which the electric field is non-uniform in magnitude and direction. Specifically, the calculated mean avalanche gain and the excess noise are presented for the Si-Ge LAPD device. It is also shown that the avalanche characteristics depend upon the specific avalanche path taken by the carrier, which depends, in turn, on the lateral location where each photon is absorbed in the Ge absorber. This property can be exploited to achieve reduced excess noise as well as wavelength-sensitive single-photon detection.

3D avalanche multiplication in Si-Ge lateral avalanche photodiodes

Modelling and Simulation of Design Variants for the Development of 4H-SiC Thyristors

Design and fabrication of basic silicon quantum photonic integrated circuits

It has been known that McIntyre’s local multiplication theory for avalanche photodiodes (APDs) does not fully explain the experimental results for single-carrier InAs APDs, which exhibit excess noise factor values below 2. While it has been established that the inclusion of the dead-space effect in the nonlocal multiplication theory resolves this discrepancy, no closed-form formulas for the mean gain and excess noise factor have been specialized to InAs APDs in a nonlocal setting. Upon utilizing prior analytical formulation of single-carrier avalanche multiplication based on age-dependent branching theory in conjunction with nonlocal ionization coefficients and thresholds for InAs, closed-form solutions of the mean gain and the excess noise factor for InAs APDs are provided here for the first time. The formulas are validated against published experimental data from InAs APDs across a variety of multiplication region widths and are shown to be applicable for devices with multiplication widths of 500 nm and larger.

/pdf/analytical-formulas-for-mean-gain-and-excess-noise-factor-in-4a4a3hc7ks.pdf

Analytical Formulas for Mean Gain and Excess Noise Factor in InAs Avalanche Photodiodes

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