Engineered tunneling layer with enhanced impact ionization for detection improvement in graphene/silicon heterojunction photodetectors

Here, an engineered tunneling layer enhanced photocurrent multiplication through the impact ionization effect was proposed and experimentally demonstrated on the graphene/silicon heterojunction photodetectors. With considering the suitable band structure of the insulation material and their special defect states, an atomic layer deposition (ALD) prepared wide-bandgap insulating (WBI) layer of AlN was introduced into the interface of graphene/silicon heterojunction. The promoted tunneling process from this designed structure demonstrated that can effectively help the impact ionization with photogain not only for the regular minority carriers from silicon, but also for the novel hot carries from graphene. As a result, significantly enhanced photocurrent as well as simultaneously decreased dark current about one order were accomplished in this graphene/insulation/silicon (GIS) heterojunction devices with the optimized AlN thickness of ~15 nm compared to the conventional graphene/silicon (GS) devices. Specifically, at the reverse bias of −10 V, a 3.96-A W−1 responsivity with the photogain of ~5.8 for the peak response under 850-nm light illumination, and a 1.03-A W−1 responsivity with ∼3.5 photogain under the 365 nm ultraviolet (UV) illumination were realized, which are even remarkably higher than those in GIS devices with either Al2O3 or the commonly employed SiO2 insulation layers. This work demonstrates a universal strategy to fabricate broadband, low-cost and high-performance photo-detecting devices towards the graphene-silicon optoelectronic integration.