Experimental characterization of peripheral photocurrent in CMOS photodiodes down to 65 nm technology

In this work, an in-depth experimental characterization of submicron CMOS p–n+ junction photodiodes operating under uniform illumination in the visible range is performed. The experimental measurements are used to validate a previous two-dimensional analytical model for the photoresponse estimation of these structures, which pays special attention to the lateral collection and was verified by means of device simulations. To do so, square p–n+ junction photodiodes with different sizes down to an active area of 0.56 μm wide have been fabricated in 180 and 65 nm technological nodes and characterized under blue, green and red light sources. As a result, the importance of the lateral collection in the overall response for small photodiodes that was previously theoretically reported is confirmed. The experimentally validated two-dimensional analytical model is a powerful tool that can be employed for the design of CMOS imagers and related electronics circuits.