Integrated silicon photoconductors for picosecond pulsing and gating

Integrated photoconductors were constructed on a crystalline Si substrate through standard integrated circuit fabrication techniques followed by shadow-masked ion-beam irradiation. Optoelectronic cross-correlation measurements were performed on these structures with a femtosecond colliding-pulse mode-locked dye laser system. Photoconductors processed as pulsers produced <2-ps rise time ∼ 200-mV pulses with full width at half maxima (FWHM) of 20 ps. Photoconductors processed as sampling gates demonstrated 3-dB measurement bandwidths between 5.3 and 7.6 GHz. Due to the absence of jitter, on-chip signal delays were measured with sub-picosecond precision.