Rule 07,'' a simple empirical relationship, conveniently estimates stateof-the-art HgCdTe dark current performance over 13 orders of magnitude, covering wavelength ranges form short-wave infrared (SWIR) to long-wave infrared (LWIR), from room temperature to liquid nitrogen temperatures. The best HgCdTe, in some cases, approaches the external radiative limit of performance, but is typically two to three orders of magnitude above that, being limited by defect generation centers as yet unidentified and/or by Auger mechanisms. The empirical relationship represents the range of detectors fabricated at Teledyne using our molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)-based doublelayer planar heterostructure (DLPH) technology, but also appears to characterize good detectors from other laboratories.

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Rule 07'' was proposed 2 years ago as a convenient rule of thumb to estimate the dark current density for state-of-the-art planar, ion-implanted, p/n HgCdTe photodiodes fabricated in layers grown by molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). The best reported HgCdTe devices from other laboratories had dark currents no lower than the rule and often higher. In the intervening time we have continued to compare the rule with performance obtained by ourselves and others to see if it stands the test of time. We also examined why it succeeds in approximating the dark current density over the thermal infrared wavebands (>4.6 lm cutoff). It turns out that the rule has held up well, still predicting dark current density values within 0.49 to 2.59 over about 13 orders of magnitude. At least at mid-wavelength infrared-long-wavelength infrared wavelengths, where the dependence is exponential with inverse cutoff and temperature, the behavior can be explained by Auger 1 processes and the diode architecture. This has significant implications for high-operating-temperature devices.

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