Fabrication of a 10 Gb/s InGaAs/InP Avalanche Photodiode with an AlGaInAs/InP Distributed Bragg Reflector

A new planar InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode (APD) is proposed and fabricated, which incorporates a high reflective AlGaInAs/InP distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) to improve its responsivity. The fabricated APD exhibits a low dark current of less than 3 nA at M=10 and high responsivity of 0.92 A/W at M=1. The gain bandwidth product of the device is above 80 GHz. The APD receiver exhibits a sensitivity of over ?26 dBm at BER = 10^?12, which is sufficient for 10 Gb/s communication systems.