All-silicon (Si) photodiodes have drawn significant interest due to their single and simple material system and perfect compatibility with complementary metal-oxide semiconductor photonics. With the help from a cavity enhancement effect, many of these photodiodes have shown considerably high responsivity at telecommunication wavelengths such as 1310 nm, yet the mechanisms for such high responsivity remain unexplained. In this work, an all-Si microring is studied systematically as a photodiode to unfold the various absorption mechanisms. At -6.4V, the microring exhibits responsivity up to ∼0.53A/W with avalanche gain, a 3 dB bandwidth of ∼25.5GHz, and open-eye diagrams up to 100 Gb/s. The measured results reveal the hybrid absorption mechanisms inside the device. A comprehensive model is reported to describe its working principle, which can guide future designs and make the all-Si microring photodiode a promising building block in Si photonics.

Silicon photonics technology has drawn significant interest due to its potential for compact and high-performance photonic integrated circuits. The Ge- or III–V material-based avalanche photodiodes integrated on silicon photonics provide ideal high sensitivity optical receivers for telecommunication wavelengths. Herein, the last advances of monolithic and heterogeneous avalanche photodiodes on silicon are reviewed, including different device structures and semiconductor systems.

We demonstrate low-voltage waveguide silicon-germanium avalanche photodiodes (APDs) integrated with distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs). The internal quantum efficiency is improved from 60% to 90% at 1550 nm assisted with DBRs while still achieving a 25 GHz bandwidth. A low breakdown voltage of 10 V and a gain bandwidth product of near 500 GHz are obtained. APDs with DBRs at a data rate of 64 Gb/s pulse amplitude modulation with four levels (PAM4) show a 30%–40% increase in optical modulation amplitude (OMA) compared to APDs with no DBR. A sensitivity of around ?13dBm at a data rate of 64 Gb/s PAM4 and a bit error rate of 2.4×10?4 is realized for APDs with DBRs, which improves the sensitivity by ～2dB compared to APDs with no DBR.