Advanced extended SWIR detector development

We are happy to share open access publication from our recent work on eSWIR barrier detector development project, where Photin worked together with Lancaster University and ams-OSRAM on:

“Quasi-planar InGaAsSb p-B-n photodiodes for spectroscopic sensing”

L. A. Hanks *1, K. Mamic1 K. Kłos2 A. Bainbridge1 J. Fletcher1 L. Gilder1 L. Tedstone1 F. J. Castaño3 and A. R. J. Marshall1

  1. Department of Physics, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YB, United Kingdom
  2. Photin LLC, 05-080 Klaudyn, Poland
  3. ams-OSRAM AG, Technology R&D, Tobelbader Strasse 30, 8141 Premstaetten, Austria
    *Corresponding author: Laura Hanks

Outline

Photin in this project witnessed and contributed to rapid traverse from ~TRL4 to TRL 8/9 of IR detector development project with state of the art scientists from Lancaster University and Tier1 manufacturer ams-OSRAM.

It was pure pleasure to work in such a great team of specialists, which worked across multiple countries.

https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.485631

Outcome

As far as we know, as the results of this project, it was achieved the lowest dark currents (and highest detectivity) for eSWIR InGaAsSb detectors with ~2.2µm cut-off at room temperature published so far. Comparison with literature[(Hao et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019; Li et al., 2020; Shafir et al., 2021) is shown below:

In the scope of project multiple professional foundries and companies providing GaSb-based wafers processing were tested.
The “Quasi-planar” processing scheme developed by Lancaster University delivered consistently the best outcomes in terms of leakage from all competition.

Follow up

When optimal epitaxy design of layer structures were established with help of the Crosslight Apsys and Synopsys Sentaurus TCAD tools, then they were grown and processed for verification.
The large portion of total dark current come from perimeter leakage mechanisms. This highlight importance of proper passivation, which will be subject of InnoGlobo2 grant with Military University of Technology and KindLab, which should start in 2023.

References


  1. Hao, H., Wang, G., Han, X., Jiang, D., Sun, Y., Guo, C., Xiang, W., Xu, Y., & Niu, Z. (2018). Extended-Wavelength InGaAsSb Infrared Unipolar Barrier Detectors. AIP Advances, 8(9), 095106. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5026839
  2. Li, N., Sun, J., Jia, Q., Song, Y., Jiang, D., Wang, G., Xu, Y., & Niu, Z. (2019). High Performance nBn Detectors Based on InGaAsSb Bulk Materials for Short Wavelength Infrared Detection. AIP Advances, 9(10), 105106. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5124093
  3. Li, N., Chen, W., Zheng, D., Sun, J., Jia, Q., Jiang, J., Wang, G., Jiang, D., Xu, Y., & Niu, Z. (2020). The Investigations to Eliminate the Bias Dependency of Quantum Efficiency of InGaAsSb nBn Photodetectors for Extended Short Wavelength Infrared Detection. Infrared Physics & Technology, 111, 103461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infrared.2020.103461
  4. Shafir, I., Snapi, N., Cohen-Elias, D., Glozman, A., Klin, O., Weiss, E., Westreich, O., Sicron, N., & Katz, M. (2021). High Responsivity InGaAsSb p–n Photodetector for Extended SWIR Detection. Appl. Phys. Lett., 118(6), 063503. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0037192