Transient simulation of resonant cavity enhanced heterojunction photodiodes

The transient response of heterojunction photodiodes under pulse illumination has been simulated. By solving discretized time dependent drift-diffusion and Poisson equations, the local potential and carrier concentrations are computed at each time step. The device-level simulation is carried out by a circuit simulator in which localized carrier transport is modeled by circuit elements such as voltage controlled current sources, capacitors, and resistors. Results on conventional AlGaAs/GaAs and resonant cavity enhanced (RCE) GaAs/InGaAs heterojunction p-i-n photodiodes are presented. For a 10- mu m*10- mu m area detector, more than 40% bandwidth improvement along with a two-fold increase in the efficiency is predicted for RCE devices over optimized conventional photodiodes.<>