We report on the highest responsivity for III-nitride Metal Semiconductor Metal solar-blind photodetectors on sapphire. Devices on unintentionally doped AlGaN epilayers grown by Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition exhibited sharp absorption cut-off in the range of 245–290 nm. Very high responsivity >5 A/W at 10 V bias was achieved with visible rejection exceeding three orders of magnitude for front illumination. Compared to the responsivity values reported in the literature for state-of-the-art solar-blind photodetectors, this work presents the highest values of responsivity at a given bias and up to sub-250 nm detection threshold. The high responsivity is attributed to an internal gain mechanism operating on these devices. The reverse-bias leakage current across these samples was found to be dominated by thermionic field emission at low biases and Poole-Frenkel emission from a deep trap level (0.7 eV from the conduction band-edge for Al0.50Ga0.50 N) at high biases.

We demonstrate epitaxial β-Ga 2 O 3 /GaN-based vertical metal-heterojunction-metal (MHM) broadband UV-A/UV-C photodetectors with high responsivity (3.7 A/W) at 256 and 365 nm, UV-to-visible rejection >10 3 , and a photo-to-dark current ratio of >100. A small (large) conduction (valence) band offset at the heterojunction of pulsed laser deposition (PLD)-grown β-Ga 2 O 3 on metal organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD)grown GaN-on-silicon with epitaxial registry, as confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) azimuthal scanning, is exploited to realize detectors with an asymmetric photoresponse and is explained with one-dimensional (1D) band diagram simulations. The demonstrated novel vertical MHM detectors on silicon are fully scalable and promising for enabling focal plane arrays for broadband ultraviolet sensing.

This Perspective seeks to understand and assess why ultrawide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductor-based deep-UV photodetectors have not yet found any noticeable presence in real-world applications despite riding on more than two decades of extensive materials and devices’ research. Keeping the discussion confined to photodetectors based on epitaxial AlGaN and Ga2O3, a broad assessment of the device performance in terms of its various parameters is done vis-à-vis the dependence on the material quality. We introduce a new comprehensive figure of merit (CFOM) to benchmark photodetectors by accounting for their three most critical performance parameters, i.e., gain, noise, and bandwidth. We infer from CFOM that purely from the point of view of device performance, AlGaN detectors do not have any serious shortcoming that is holding them back from entering the market. We try to identify the gaps that exist in the research landscape of AlGaN and Ga2O3 solar-blind photodetectors and also argue that merely improving the material/structural quality and device performance would not help in making this technology transition from the academic realm. Instead of providing a review, this Perspective asks the hard question on whether UWBG solar-blind detectors will ever find real-world applications in a noticeable way and whether these devices will be ever used in space-borne platforms for deep-space imaging, for instance.

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