Evolution of photodetectors by silicon-on-insulator material

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) provides distinctive characteristics to photodetectors based on optical confinement and carrier confinement, resulting in enhanced light absorption and sensitive detection of photo-generated carriers, respectively. Specifically, the waveguiding modes in the SOI photodiode can be induced by the diffracted light from the surface plasmon antenna on top to give an enhanced light sensitivity, and wavelength and polarization selectivities. The carrier confinement in the SOI body enables one-by-one detection of the photo-generated carriers in SOI MOSFET, leading to the single-photon detection. In this report, such new features of photodetectors attained by SOI will be introduced.