InGaAs/InP SPAD with Monolithically Integrated Zinc-Diffused Resistor

Afterpulsing and optical crosstalk are significant performance limitations for applications employing near-infrared single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs). In this paper, we describe an InGaAs/InP SPAD with monolithically integrated resistor that is fully compatible with the planar fabrication process and provides a significant reduction of the avalanche charge and, thus, of afterpulsing and optical crosstalk. In order to have a fast SPAD reset (<50 ns), we fabricated quenching resistors ranging from 10 to 200 k\Ω, smaller than what is available in the literature. The resistor, fabricated with the zinc diffusions already used for avoiding premature edge-breakdown, promptly reduces the avalanche current to a low value ∼ 100~ μ A in less than 1 ns, while an active circuit completes the quenching and enforces a well-defined hold-off. The proposed mixed-quenching approach guarantees an avalanche charge reduction of more than 20 times compared with similar plain SPADs, enough to reduce the hold-off time down to 1 μ s. Finally, a compact single-photon counting module based on this detector and featuring 70-ps photon-timing jitter is presented.