A high-speed avalanche photodiode

Abstract

High-speed avalanche photodiodes are widely used in optical communication systems. Nowadays, separate absorption charge and multiplication structure is widely adopted. In this article, a structure with higher speed than separate absorption charge and multiplication structure is reported. Besides the traditional absorption layer, charge layer and multiplication layer, this structure introduces an additional charge layer and transit layer and thus can be referred to as separate absorption, charge, multiplication, charge and transit structure. The introduction of the new charge layer and transit layer brings additional freedom in device structure design. The benefit of this structure is that the carrier transit time and device capacitance can be reduced independently, thus the 3 dB bandwidth could be improved by more than 50% in contrast to the separate absorption charge and multiplication structure with the same size.