Aly F. Elrefaie

Black holes enabled light bending and trapping in ultrafast silicon photodetectors

Micro and nanoscale holes on the surfaces of indirect band gap semiconductors such as silicon can enable perpendicular light bending and trapping of photons to enhance the light material interactions and absorption by orders of magnitude. The ‘bending’ of a vertically oriented light beam at nearly 90 degrees can be visualized as radial waves generated by a pebble dropped into a calm pool of water. Such bending and photon trapping result in an increased optical absorption path enabling very high light absorption coefficients. This observation led to the design of silicon photodetectors with high broadband efficiency above 50% and record ultrafast response contributing to more than 40 billion bits of data per second (Gb/s) communication speed.

Optimization of light trapping micro-hole structure for high-speed high-efficiency silicon photodiodes

We optimized micro-holes in a thin slab for fast Si photodetectors at wavelength 800–950nm. Lateral modes are shown to be responsible for the effective light trapping. Small disorder and cone hole shapes helped achieve uniform quantum efficiency in a wide wavelength range.

Fabrication of effective photon trapping and light manipulating micro/nano structures

We present a CMOS compatible fabrication technique to create micro/nanostructures on silicon and germanium surfaces for effective photon trapping and enhanced absorption. We achieved many times of absorption enhancement enabled by these photon trapping micro/nanostructures compared to bulk silicon and germanium counterparts. This method can lead to designing both highly efficient photovoltaics, ultra-fast photodetectors and highly sensitive photon counting devices with dramatically reduced device thickness. We also demonstrate that different fabrication techniques (dry etch, wet etch, and their combination) and different geometries of these micro/nanostructures can affect the ability and extent of the photon trapping and light manipulation in semiconductor.

Photon-trapping micro/nanostructures for high linearity in ultra-fast photodiodes

Photodetectors (PDs) in datacom and computer networks where the link length is up to 300 m, need to handle higher than typical input power used in other communication links. Also, to reduce power consumption due to equalization at high speed (>25Gb/s), the datacom links will use PAM-4 signaling instead of NRZ with stringent receiver linearity requirements. Si PDs with photon-trapping micro/nanostructures are shown to have high linearity in output current verses input optical power. Though there is less silicon material due to the holes, the micro-/nanostructured holes collectively reradiate the light to an in-plane direction of the PD surface and can avoid current crowding in the PD. Consequently, the photocurrent per unit volume remains at a low level contributing to high linearity in the photocurrent. We present the effect of design and lattice patterns of micro/nanostructures on the linearity of ultra-fast silicon PDs designed for high speed multi gigabit data networks.

Improved bandwidth and quantum efficiency in silicon photodiodes using photon-manipulating micro/nanostructures operating in the range of 700-1060 nm

Nanostructures allow broad spectrum and near-unity optical absorption and contributed to high performance low-cost Si photovoltaic devices. However, the efficiency is only a few percent higher than a conventional Si solar cell with thicker absorption layers. For high speed surface illuminated photodiodes, the thickness of the absorption layer is critical for short transit time and RC time. Recently a CMOS-compatible micro/nanohole silicon (Si) photodiode (PD) with more than 20 Gb/s data rate and with 52 % quantum efficiency (QE) at 850 nm was demonstrated. The achieved QE is over 400% higher than a similar Si PD with the same thickness but without absorption enhancement microstructure holes. The micro/nanoholes increases the QE by photon trapping, slow wave effects and generate a collective assemble of modes that radiate laterally, resulting in absorption enhancement and therefore increase in QE. Such Si PDs can be further designed to enhance the bandwidth (BW) of the PDs by reducing the device capacitance with etched holes in the pin junction. Here we present the BW and QE of Si PDs achievable with micro/nanoholes based on a combination of empirical evidence and device modeling. Higher than 50 Gb/s data rate with greater than 40% QE at 850 nm is conceivable in transceivers designed with such Si PDs that are integrated with photon trapping micro and nanostructures. By monolithic integration with CMOS/BiCMOS integrated circuits such as transimpedance amplifiers, equalizers, limiting amplifiers and other application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), the data rate can be increased to more than 50 Gb/s.

Highly efficient silicon solar cells designed with photon trapping micro/nano structures

Crystalline silicon (c-Si) remains the most commonly used material for photovoltaic (PV) cells in the current commercial solar cells market. However, current technology requires “thick” silicon due to the relative weak absorption of Si in the solar spectrum. We demonstrate several CMOS compatible fabrication techniques including dry etch, wet etch and their combination to create different photon trapping micro/nanostructures on very thin c-silicon surface for light harvesting of PVs. Both, the simulation and experimental results show that these photon trapping structures are responsible for the enhancement of the visible light absorption which leads to improved efficiency of the PVs. Different designs of micro/nanostructures via different fabrication techniques are correlated with the efficiencies of the PVs. Our method can also drastically reduce the thickness of the c-Si PVs, and has great potential to reduce the cost, and lead to highly efficient and flexible PVs.