Ge on Si waveguide-integrated photodiodes for high speed and low power receivers

Development of fast silicon photonics integrated circuit is mainly driven by the reduction of the power consumption. As a result, photodetectors with high efficiency, high speed and low dark current are needed to reduce the global link consumption. Germanium is now considered as the ideal candidate for fully integrated receivers based on SOI substrate and CMOS-like processes. We report on low power and high speed waveguide-integrated Ge photodetectors. Butt coupled lateral PIN structure photodiodes have been fabricated by Germanium selective growth and ion implantation at the end of silicon waveguide. Three types of photodiodes are reported, with dark current as low as 6nA at 1V reverse bias, optical bandwidth over 40GHz at zero bias and responsivity up to 0.8A/W at a wavelength of 1550nm. Such devices are suitable for data rate over 40Gbps and can be easily integrated with other photonic devices to fabricate wafer scale integrated circuits for datacom and telecom applications.