Impact ionization characteristics of III-V semiconductors for a wide range of multiplication region thicknesses

Recently, an impact ionization model, which takes the nonlocal nature of the impact ionization process into account, has been described. This model incorporates history-dependent ionization coefficients. Excellent fits to experimental gain and noise measurements for GaAs were achieved using an effective field approach and simple analytical expressions for the ionization probabilities. In the paper, we briefly review the history-dependent model and apply it to Al/sub 0.2/Ga/sub 0.8/As, In/sub 0.52/Al/sub 0.48/As and InP avalanche photodiodes. For the study, the gain and noise characteristics of a series of homojunction avalanche photodiodes with different multiplication thicknesses were measured and fit with the history-dependent model. A "size-effect" in thin (<0.5 /spl mu/m) multiplication regions, which is not adequately characterized by the local-field avalanche theory, was observed for each of these materials. The history-dependent model, on the other hand, achieved close agreement with the experimental results.