Solar-blind photodetectors and focal plane arrays based on AlGaN

III-Nitride material system (AlGaInN) possesses unique optical, electrical and structural properties such as a wide tunable direct bandgap, inherent fast carrier dynamics; good carrier transport properties, high breakdown fields; and high robustness and chemical stability. Recent technological advances in the wide bandgap AlGaN portion of this material system have led to a renewed interest in ultraviolet (UV) photodetectors. These detectors find use in numerous applications in the defense, commercial and scientific arenas such as covert space-To-space communications, early missile threat detection, chemical and biological threat detection and spectroscopy, flame detection and monitoring, UV environmental monitoring, and UV astronomy.^1,2,3 Back illuminated detectors operating in the solar blind region are of special interest. Back illumination allows the detector to be hybridized to a silicon read-out integrated circuit, epi-side down, and still collect light through the back of the transparent sapphire substrate. This allows the realization of solar blind focal plane arrays (FPAs) for imaging applications. Solar-blind FPAs are especially important because of the near total absence of any background radiation in this region. In this talk, we will present our recent back-illuminated solar-blind photodetector, mini-Array, and FPA results. By systematically optimizing the design of the structure we have realized external quantum efficiencies (EQE) of in excess of 89% for pixel-sized detectors. Based on the absence of any anti-reflection coating, this corresponds to nearly 100% internal quantum efficiency. At the same time, the dark current remains below ∼2 × 10^-9 A/cm² even at 10 volts of reverse bias. The detector has a very sharp falloff starting at 275 with the UV-solar rejection of better than three orders of magnitude, and a visible rejection ratio is more than 6 orders of magnitude. This high performance photodetector design was then used as the basis of the realization of solar-blind FPA. We demonstrated a 320×256 FPA with a peak detection wavelength of 278nm. The operability of the FPA was better than 92%, and excellent corrected imaging was obtained.