Abstract

Recently, superlattice avalanche photodiodes (SL-APDs)^1,2 have demonstrated a gain-bandwidth (GB) product higher than 120 GHz and a high sensitivity better than -27 dBm at 10 Gbit/s.^3,4 The SL-APD receivers are useful because of their simple and small-size construction, low power consumption, and high-sensitivity in 2.5-10 Gbit/s applications. In particular, their low-operating voltage and low-cost nature derived from a simple mesa-structure are attractive for new high-speed local-area-network (LAN) applications such as fiber video receivers⁵ and Gbit/s data-links. This paper confirms for the first time the high-reliability of mesa-structure InAlGaAs/InALAs SL-APDs. To further improve their reliability for trunk-line applications, a new planar-structure is proposed.

© 1996 Optical Society of America