Study of HgCdTe (100) and HgCdTe (111)B Heterostructures Grown by MOCVD and Their Potential Application to APDs Operating in the IR Range up to 8 µm

The trend related to reach the high operating temperature condition (HOT, temperature, T > 190 K) achieved by thermoelectric (TE) coolers has been observed in infrared (IR) technology recently. That is directly related to the attempts to reduce the IR detector size, weight, and power dissipation (SWaP) conditions. The room temperature avalanche photodiodes technology is well developed in short IR range (SWIR) while devices operating in mid-wavelength (MWIR) and long-wavelength (LWIR) require cooling to suppress dark current due to the low energy bandgap. The paper presents research on the potential application of the HgCdTe (100) oriented and HgCdTe (111)B heterostructures grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) on GaAs substrates for the design of avalanche photodiodes (APDs) operating in the IR range up to 8 µm and under 2-stage TE cooling (T = 230 K). While HgCdTe band structure with molar composition x_Cd < 0.5 provides a very favorable hole-to-electron ionization coefficient ratio under avalanche conditions, resulting in increased gain without generating excess noise, the low level of background doping concentration and a low number of defects in the active layer is also required. HgCdTe (100) oriented layers exhibit better crystalline quality than HgCdTe (111)B grown on GaAs substrates, low dislocation density, and reduction of residual defects which contribute to a background doping within the range ~10¹⁴ cm^-3. The fitting to the experimentally measured dark currents (at T = 230 K) of the N⁺-ν-p-P⁺ photodiodes commonly used as an APDs structure allowed to determine the material parameters. Experimentally extracted the mid-bandgap trap concentrations at the level of 2.5 × 10¹⁴ cm^-3 and 1 × 10¹⁵ cm^-3 for HgCdTe (100) and HgCdTe (111)B photodiode are reported respectively. HgCdTe (100) is better to provide high resistance, and consequently sufficient strength and uniform electric field distribution, as well as to avoid the tunneling current contribution at higher bias, which is a key issue in the proper operation of avalanche photodiodes. It was presented that HgCdTe (100) based N⁺-ν-p-P⁺ gain, M > 100 could be reached for reverse voltage > 5 V and excess noise factor F(M) assumes: 2.25 (active layer, x_Cd = 0.22, k = 0.04, M = 10) for λ_cut-off = 8 μm and T = 230 K. In addition the 4-TE cooled, 8 μm APDs performance was compared to the state-of-the-art for SWIR and MWIR APDs based mainly on III-V and HgCdTe materials (T = 77-300 K).