Transient simulation of heterojunction photodiodes-part II: analysis of resonant cavity enhanced photodetectors

Abstract

The high-speed response properties of resonant cavity enhanced (RCE) photodetectors have been investigated. The limitations on the high-speed performance of photodiodes and the advantages of RCE-detection are discussed. Transient response of heterojunction photodiodes under pulsed optical illumination has been simulated using the method described in Part I. Results on conventional AlGaAs/GaAs and RCE GaAs/InGaAs heterojunction p-i-n photodiodes are presented. For small area detectors, almost 50% bandwidth improvement along with a two-fold increase in efficiency is predicted for RCE devices over optimized conventional photodiodes. A nearly three-fold enhancement in the bandwidth-efficiency product was shown. >