High Speed and High Sensitivity InGaAs/InAlAs Single Photon Avalanche Diodes for Photon Counting Communication

Development of InGaAs/AlGaAsSb Geiger Mode Avalanche Photodiodes

“…Values of breakdown voltage were extracted by extrapolating M -1 (V) to zero for each temperature point, yielding a Cbd value of 13.5 mV.K -1 . This is much lower compared to ~100 mV.K -1 [32] and 20-50 mV.K -1 [23][24][25][26] for InGaAs/InP and InGaAs/InAlAs APDs.…”

“…Fig. 4 DCR versus SPDE data from this work (star) and reports using InAlAs [22][23][24] (green) and InP [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] (black/white/grey) avalanche layers.…”

“…Recently, Al0.85Ga0.15As0.56Sb0.44 (AlGaAsSb) has emerged as a superior avalanche material for Linear mode APDs, with experimental reports of highly dissimilar ionization coefficients [28] and low excess noise factor [29] (resulting in very low Noise-Equivalent-Power [30]). Reported values of Cbd for a GaAsSb/AlGaAsSb SAM APD are ~4 mV/K [31], lower than equivalent InGaAs-based APDs with InP (~100 mV.K -1 ) [32] and InAlAs (~20-50 mV.K -1 ) [23][24][25][26] avalanche layers. Having very low Cbd values is advantageous for achieving SPADs with higher operation stability.…”

“…Although the avalanche material InP benefits from a mature manufacturing process, its temperature stability of avalanche characteristics, characterized by thermal coefficient of breakdown voltage, Cbd, is worse than alternative avalanche materials, such as In0.52Al0.48As, hereafter referred to as InAlAs [21]. Coupled with potentially higher avalanche breakdown probability, SPADs using InAlAs avalanche layers have been reported [22][23][24][25][26][27]. However, their performance is still below those of InGaAs/InP SPADs (InAlAs SPADs typically exhibit higher DCR than InP SPADs for a given SPDE).…”

“…The InGaAs/AlGaAsSb APDs exhibited increasing SPDE at the expense of increasing DCR. The photon peak duration is dominated by the timing uncertainty of the measurement equipment (~1 ns).DCR (scaled to device area) versus SPDE data of our InGaAs/AlGaAsSb APDs are compared with reported values for InP[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and InAlAs[22][23][24] SPADs inFig. 4.…”