On the Sensitivity of Electron-Injection Detectors at Low Light Level

IEEE Photonics Journal

Hooman Mohseni¹  Iman Hassani Nia¹  Vala Fathipour¹  Alireza Bonakdar¹ 

[1] Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;

关键词: Optoelectronic materials;    Imaging;    Imaging systems;    Applications;    Infrared;    photodetector;   

DOI  :  10.1109/JPHOT.2016.2558508

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

We present the signal-to-noise performance of a short-wave infrared detector, which offers an internal avalanche-free gain. The detector is based on a similar mechanism as the heterojunction phototransistor and takes advantage of a type-II band alignment. Current devices demonstrate a noise-equivalent sensitivity of ~670 photons at 260 K and over a linear dynamic range of 20 dB. While this level of sensitivity is about an order of magnitude better than an ideal p-i-n detector attached to the same low-noise amplifier, it was still limited by the amplifier noise (~2600 electrons root mean square) due to the insufficient device gain. Performance comparison with other SWIR detector technologies demonstrates that the so-called electron-injection detectors offer more than three orders of magnitude better noise-equivalent sensitivity compared with state-of-the-art phototransistors operating at similar temperature.

【 授权许可】

Unknown