Abstract
We have studied the effect of the thickness of the multiplication region on the noise performance characteristics of avalanche photodiodes (APD's). Our simulation results are based on a full band Monte Carlo model with anisotropic threshold energies for impact ionization. Simulation results suggest that the well known McIntyre expression for the excess noise factor is not directly applicable for devices with a very thin multiplication region. Since the number of events is drastically reduced when the multiplication layer is very thin, the ionization coefficient is not a good physical parameter to characterize the process. Instead effective quantum yield, which is a measure of the total electron-hole pair generation in the device, is a more appropriate parameter to consider. We also show that for the device structure considered here, modeling the excess noise factor using a discrete Bernoulli trial model as opposed to the conventional continuum theory produces closer agreement to experimental measurements. Our results reinforce the understanding that impact is a strong function of carrier energy and the use of simplified field-dependent models to characterize this high energy process fails to accurately model this phenomenon. >
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