Effect of dead space on gain and noise in Si and GaAs avalanche photodiodes

Avalanche Photodiodes in Submicron CMOS Technologies for High-Sensitivity Imaging

“…One of the reasons is that the ionization coefficient ratio k is closer to unity, so the noise due to hole initiated avalanche is lower, as can be observed comparing the p+/n structures in (Biber et al, 2001) and (Stapels et al, 2007). When the doping levels are even higher, the width of the multiplication region is reduced and standard McIntyre theory is no longer adequate to describe the avalanche process because of the dead space effect (Hayat et al, 1992). In this case, the noise factor becomes lower than the one predicted by standard model both for electron-and hole-initiated avalanche, as observed in (Pancheri et al, 2008).…”

EFFECT OF MULTIPLICATION REGION MOLE FRACTION ON CHARACTERISTICS OF ALxGA1-xAS-APDS IN THE LINEAR AND GEIGER

“…This model has been shown to correctly predict the excess noise factors independently of the width of the multiplication layer. The gain statistics for double-carrier multiplication APDs, in the presence of dead space and a uniform or a nonuniform electric field, have been developed and reported in [2,[10][11][12]. The theory involves recurrence equations of certain intermediate random variables.…”

“…With this assumption, Hayat et al [2,[10][11][12] formulated a dead-spacemultiplication theory (DSMT) that permitted the gain, excess noise factor, breakdown probability, breakdown voltage, and gain probability distribution to be determined in the presence of dead space. Because the DSMT developed in [11] incorporates a nonuniform electric field, it can accommodate arbitrary history-dependent ionization coefficients.…”

Numerical Analysis of Homojunction Avalanche Photodiodes (Apds)

“…Assuming Poisson photon statistics, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the total charge accumulation in the detection circuit in a time interval T is given by [17] …”