High gain and low excess noise InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode with lateral impact ionization

In this paper, modeling for a lateral impact ionization InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode (APD) has been performed based on a device simulator, i.e., Silvaco ATLAS. Compared with traditional APDs, the lateral impact ionized APD has much higher gains as well as lower excess noise. The internal gain for our newly proposed lateral APD is over 1000—near the breakthrough voltage. In addition, the excess noise characteristic of this device is also discussed with three-dimensional dead space multiplication theory, and the calculated effective k value is obviously lower than traditional InGaAs/InP APDs. Because of the high gain and low excess noise characteristics, the proposed APD can be widely applied for optical detection with high sensitivity.