Control of dark current mechanisms is essential to improving the performance of infrared photodetectors and many other electronic devices. Unipolar barriers can readily be applied to practically and efficiently filter out multiple dark current components exhibited by infrared photodetectors. Via careful placement of unipolar barriers in a standard photodetector architecture, effective suppression of dark currents due to surface leakage, direct band-to-band tunneling, trap-assisted tunneling, and Shockley-Read-Hall generation is demonstrated. We present unipolar barrier photodiodes exhibiting six orders of magnitude improvement in RoA and near Auger-limited device performance.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.