Modified Uni-Traveling-Carrier Photodetector with Its Optimized Cliff Layer

We have designed the MUTC-PD with an optimized thickness of cliff layer to pre-distort the electric field at the front side of the collection layer. With the optimized MUTC-PD design, the collapse of the electric field will be greatly suppressed, and the electrons in its collection layer will gradually reach their peak velocity with the growing incident light power. Moreover, as the incident light intensity increases, the differential capacitance also declines, thus the total bandwidth grows. It will make the MUTC-PD achieve high-speed and high-power response performance simultaneously. Based on simulation, for 16μm MUTC-PD with a 70 nm cliff layer, the maximum 3 dB bandwidth at −5 V is 137 GHz, compared with 64 GHz for the MUTC-PD with a 30 nm cliff layer. The saturation RF output power is 27.4 dBm at 60 GHz.