Abstract

With its compatibility for monolithic integration with silicon and its higher electron and hole mobilities compared to silicon, germanium is an essential semiconductor to be used in photonic devices—including photodetectors. To determine the stability, efficiency, and speed of a photodetector, one must measure or calculate the phase noise, quantum efficiency, and response time of the photodetector. We recently developed an efficient drift-diffusion equations solver that uses a non-uniform time-stepping [1] and both single-frequency and broadband excitations to calculate the phase noise [2], quantum efficiency [2], and bandwidth [3] of photodetectors that have several layers of semiconducting materials with varying thicknesses and doping concentrations.

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