Plasmon-enhanced graphene photodetector with CMOS-compatible titanium nitride

Abstract

Graphene has emerged as an ultrafast optoelectronic material for on-chip photodetector applications. The 2D nature of graphene enables its facile integration with complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) microelectronics and silicon photonics, yet graphene absorbs only ∼2.3% of light. Plasmonic metals can enhance the responsivity of graphene photodetectors, but may result in CMOS-incompatible devices, depending on the choice of metal. Here, we propose a plasmon-enhanced photothermoelectric graphene photodetector using CMOS-compatible titanium nitride (TiN) on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. The device performance is compared for two substrate materials: SiO 2 and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). We find out that the thermoelectric performance of graphene is enhanced by hBN, but this enhancement comes at the expense of a slower device speed. Moreover, our study reveals that the bandwidth of the graphene-on-SiO 2 photodetector has a ∼150 GHz theoretical limit, and ∼ 65 GHz for the graphene-on-hBN photodetector. The device presented in this study has a high-speed response with a responsivity as high as 4.4 A/W for an ultracompact length of 3.5 µm, and exhibits a nearly flat photoresponse across the telecom C-band. Furthermore, the presented device operates at zero-bias, consumes zero energy, and has an ultra-low intrinsic noise equivalent power (NEP < 25 pW/ √ Hz).