Linear-Cascade Near-Ballistic Unitraveling-Carrier Photodiodes With an Extremely High Saturation Current–Bandwidth Product

Saturation current-bandwidth product (SCBP), the key of figure of merit in high-speed and high-power photodiodes (PDs), is mainly limited by the tradeoff between carrier drift time in depletion layer and RC-limited bandwidth of conventional PDs. Here, we present a revolutionary photodiode structure: linear-cascade photodiodes (LCPDs), designed to further improve the SCBP performance. Our demonstrated LCPD structure can greatly increase the SCBP without using a complex distributed structure of the traveling-wave PD or reducing the load resistance (output RF power). Two flip-chip bonding packaged near-ballistic unitraveling-carrier photodiode (NBUTC-PD) units are employed in our LCPD structure. It exhibits a great improvement in SCBP compared to that of the control device with a single NBUTC-PD. A two-port equivalent-circuit model is established for the LCPDs and the modeling results clearly indicate that the increase in SCBP can be attributed to the significant reduction in its total capacitance due to the serial connection. Furthermore, we find that only when each PD unit in the LCPD structure has the same amount of injected optical power and modulated frequency of optical signal, the whole structure exhibits a carrier transit time as short as that of a single PD. Under the proper optical excitation, we can achieve a record high SCBP (7500 mA·GHz and 100 GHz) for two-element LCPDs under a 50 Ω load.