Integrated high speed silicon PIN photodiode sensor

A silicon PIN photodiode was integrated in bipolar electronic circuits. An extremely high-positivity P/sup --/ epitaxial layer on a P/sup +/ substrate was employed to create a high-speed responsive PIN structure. All of the bipolar transistors and resistances were arranged with the lightly doped P/sup -/ well region. The following growth of an N-type epitaxial layer and the trench isolation process formed the photodiode cathode region and the transistor active area simultaneously. The experimental results on this PIN photodiode with 0.145-mm/sup 2/ sensitive area indicate 680 MHz for the cutoff frequency at 10-V bias with 830-nm radiation and 2.6 ns and 2.5 ns for rise and fall time, respectively. A 50-Mb/s simple optical link with a monolithic receiver was produced based on this technology.<>