A new look at impact ionization-Part II: Gain and noise in short avalanche photodiodes

For Part I see R.J. McIntyre, ibid., vol.46, no.8, pp.1623-31 (1999). In Part I, a new theory for impact ionization that utilizes history-dependent ionization coefficients to account for the nonlocal nature of the ionization process has been described. In this paper, we will review this theory and extend it with the assumptions that are implicitly used in both the local-field theory in which the ionization coefficients are functions only of the local electric field and the new one. A systematic study of the noise characteristics of GaAs homojunction avalanche photodiodes with different multiplication layer thicknesses is also presented. It is demonstrated that there is a definite “size effect” for thin multiplication regions that is not well characterized by the local-field model. The new theory, on the other hand, provides very good fits to the measured gain and noise. The new ionization coefficient model has also been validated by Monte Carlo simulations