A high-speed and high-responsivity photodiode in standard CMOS technology

This work investigates a new silicon (Si) photodiode (PD) by standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process. The basic structure of the proposed Si PD is formed by multiple p-n diodes with shallow trench isolation oxide in between p- and n-region from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 0.18-mu m CMOS technology. The proposed PD demonstrates a responsivity of 0.37 A/W at zero bias (lambda = 823 nm). At reverse bias (V-R) of 14.3 V, the fabricated PD exhibits a high responsivity of 0.74 A/W, a -3-dB electrical bandwidth of 1.6 GHz, and an eye diagram at 3.5 Gb/s.