Schottky Photodetectors with Transparent Conductive Oxides for Photonic Integrated Circuits

Silicon photonics has many attractive features but faces a major issue: inefficient and slow photodetection in the telecom range. New metal–semiconductor Schottky photodetectors based on intraband absorption address this problem, but their efficiency remains low. We suggest that by creating a junction between silicon and a transparent oxide with appropriate doping, which results in a real permittivity close to zero (known as the epsilon near zero or ENZ regime), detection efficiency could increase by more than 10-fold. Using aluminum zinc oxide (AZO) as an example, we design an optimized AZO/Si slot photonic waveguide detector that could potentially reach an efficiency of several tens of percent, in contrast to a few percent for a metal/Si Schottky detector. This increase is primarily due to the lower density of states in AZO compared to that of metal, along with superior coupling efficiency and strong absorption within a 10 nm slot.