High‐Gain Avalanche Photodiode
DOI: 10.1063/1.881723
As optical communications systems get faster and faster, approaching 10 Gbit/second, near‐infrared receivers are struggling to keep pace with them. What’s needed are avalanche photodetectors with enough gain to amplify the much shorter pulses that come in at these higher bit rates. Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Kista, Sweden, hope that their new avalanche photodiode (APD) will fill the bill: Its gain‐bandwidth product is over 300 GHz. That’s nearly double the best performance demonstrated up to now by an APD (the old record was held by a superlattice design introduced in the late 1980s) and almost quadruple that of commercial receivers.
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