Material and design engineering of (Al)GaN for high-performance avalanche photodiodes and intersubband applications

Numerous applications in scientific, medical, and military areas demand robust, compact, sensitive, and fast ultraviolet (UV) detection. Our (Al)GaN photodiodes pose high avalanche gain and single-photon detection efficiency that can measure up to these requirements. Inherit advantage of back-illumination in our devices offers an easier integration and layout packaging via flip-chip hybridization for UV focal plane arrays that may find uses from space applications to hostile-agent detection. Thanks to the recent (Al)GaN material optimization, III-Nitrides, known to have fast carrier dynamics and short relaxation times, are employed in (Al)GaN based superlattices that absorb in near-infrared regime. In this work, we explain the origins of our high performance UV APDs, and employ our (Al)GaN material knowledge for intersubband applications. We also discuss the extension of this material engineering into the far infrared, and even the terahertz (THz) region.