Enhanced corrugated QWIP performance using dielectric coverage

We report here the effect of dielectric/metal coverage on the performance of the corrugated quantum well infrared photodetectors (C-QWIP) in two wavelength regimes. We found that with proper dielectrics, both the detector dark current and the spectral responsivity can he improved upon the monitoring 45° edge coupled QWIP. In the 8 μm regime, the normalized responsivity of a Si₃ N₄ covered C-QWIP was found to be improved by 3.3 times. In the 14 μm regime, the improvement is a factor of 1.8 using Si₃N₄ coverage and a factor of 2.5 using SiO₂ coverage