High-responsivity on-chip waveguide coupled germanium photodetector for 2 μm waveband

Abstract

Recently, the emerging 2 μm waveband has gained increasing interest due to its great potential for a wide scope of applications. Compared with the existing optical communication windows at shorter wavelengths, it also offers distinct advantages of lower nonlinear absorption, better fabrication tolerance, and larger free carrier plasma effects for silicon photonics, which has been a proven device technology. While much progress has been witnessed for silicon photonics at the 2 μm waveband, the primary challenge still exists for on-chip detectors. Despite the maturity and compatibility of the waveguide coupled photodetectors made of germanium, the 2 μm regime is far beyond its cutoff wavelength. In this work, we demonstrate an efficient and high-speed on-chip waveguide-coupled germanium photodetector operating at the 2 μm waveband. The weak sub-bandgap absorption of epitaxial germanium is greatly enhanced by a lateral separation absorption charge multiplication structure. The detector is fabricated by the standard process offered by a commercial foundry. The device has a benchmark performance with responsivity of 1.05 A/W and 3 dB bandwidth of 7.12 GHz, which is able to receive high-speed signals with up to 20 Gbit/s data rate. The availability of such an efficient and fast on-chip detector circumvents the barriers between silicon photonic integrated circuits and the potential applications at the 2 μm waveband.