Enhanced bandwidth of a lateral-pin Ge/Si avalanche photodiode using inductive gain peaking

Abstract

Lateral-pin germanium silicon avalanche photodiodes (APDs) offer great potential for improving performance, cost-effectiveness, and versatile production processes for large-capacity data communication applications. However, excessive avalanche multiplication noise limits the increase in bandwidth. In this study, we propose and design the integrated peaking inductors to enhance the bandwidth of a lateral pin Ge/Si APD without compromising the direct current (DC) characteristics. By introducing the spiral inductor to counteract the capacitive effect of APD, the RF output power at high frequency can be effectively increased, thus improving the photodiode bandwidth. The impact of different sizes of inductors and APDs on the performance was experimentally investigated. The resulting APDs, with Ge lengths of 20μm (Ge20) and 45μm (Ge45), provided low dark currents of 11 nA and 27 nA, and primary responsivities of 0.85 A/W and 1.05 A/W at −1 V, respectively. A small inductor (375 pH) exhibited greater bandwidth enhancement than a large inductor (622 pH) and the Ge20 APD achieved a bandwidth of up to 78 GHz. For the larger Ge45 APD, the bandwidth was maintained above 50 GHz, even close to the breakdown voltage, and a high gain-bandwidth product of up to 609 GHz was calculated by an avalanche multiplication gain of 11.7. This result may provide ideas for balancing the speed and sensitivity of lateral-pin APDs used in high-speed optical communications.