High performance InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode integrated with metal-insulator-metal microcavity

Hao Han,Ding Wang,Yicheng Zhu,Huidan Qu,Wantian Gao,Wenjuan Wang,Zilu Guo,Zhifeng Li

doi:10.1007/s11082-021-02915-x

Abstract

Reducing the dark current of InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiodes (APDs) is an important way to improve its performance. Decreasing the active size can reduce the dark current but sacrifice the quantum efficiency. In this paper, the metal–insulator-metal (MIM) microcavity is integrated with an APD, which can converge light from tens of micrometers to several micrometers, so as to compensate for the loss of detection efficiency caused by the reduction of the size of the APD. Through photoelectric joint simulation, the optical response of the device can be obtained, and the coupling effect between the MIM structure and the APD can be analyzed directly. The simulation results show that the photocurrent to the dark current ratio of the APD integrated with the MIM microcavity is twice of the MIM free traditional APD, and the 3 dB bandwidth reaches 5.8 GHz. When the MIM microcavity is applied to an APD array, the optical crosstalk between pixels is found to be negligible.

Highlights

High sensitivity avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are the core component of single photon detection, which are mainly used for quantum key distribution (Albota et al 2006; Liao et al 2017) and 3D lidar detection (Marinelli et al 2018; Yu et al 2017)
Summary: The optoelectronic coupling effect of the metal insulator metal (MIM) microcavity and the APD is optimized by the method of the photoelectric joint simulation
Considering a certain divergence angle of the output light from the MIM cavity, the active width of the APD is designed as 6 μm and the distance from the MIM bottom layer to the absorption layer is designed as 1 μm

Summary

Introduction

High sensitivity avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are the core component of single photon detection, which are mainly used for quantum key distribution (Albota et al 2006; Liao et al 2017) and 3D lidar detection (Marinelli et al 2018; Yu et al 2017). The MIM microcavity can collimate and focus the incident light to several microns, and have a high optical transmittance, which provides an effective way to reduce the APD’s active diameter to several microns while maintaining a high optical response.

Results

Conclusion