High-speed photodiode signal enhancement at avalanche breakdown voltage

Abstract

It has previously been found that when photons are injected into a photodiode biased to the avalanche region, that there is a multiplication of the signal over the usual bias-voltage signal level. This multiplication is due to the created electron-hole pairs colliding with the lattice and creating more electron-hole pairs under the influence of the large biasing field. This paper presents a circuit analysis of this effect when using a high-speed silicon (Si) P-I-N photodiode and shows what the SNR bandwidth and Noise Equivalent Power (NEP) are under both normal bias conditions and avalanche bias conditions. It is shown that there is a substantial improvement in the NEP and SNR ratio at high frequencies when operating at avalanche so that the device may be made nearly shot noise limited if the multiplication factor <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</tex> is sufficiently large. Microwave measurements on such a high-speed diode gave gains greater than 30 dB with a SNR improvement of 13 dB at 1.45 Gc/s. The effect was observed at frequencies as high as 2.54 Gc/s and appeared to follow a linear 1/M law with bias voltage in the avalanche region with some deviation at large values of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</tex> . The device SNR ratio at moderately high light levels is determined by the signal-to-shot noise ratio. A high modulation depth is found to be essential to reduce shot noise. Analysis of the diode circuit reveals that the detected signal power bandwidth product is a constant. The NEP is found to vary directly with the bandwidth in a pulse type system. Avalanche operation increases the signal power by M <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> and decreases the NEP by <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</tex> at high frequencies. The photodiode appears to nearly provide the solid-state analog of the photomultiplier tube.