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Gate-Tunable Short-Wave Infrared Polycrystalline GeSn Phototransistors on Noncrystalline Substrates

Journal Article · · ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
GeSn is a group-IV alloy with immense potential to advance microelectronics technology due to its intrinsic compatibility with existing Si CMOS processes. With a sufficiently high Sn composition, GeSn is classified as a direct bandgap semiconductor. Polycrystalline GeSn holds several additional advantages, including its significantly lower synthesis cost compared to its epitaxial counterpart, as well as the versatility to grow these films on a variety of substrates. Here, in this work, we present a polycrystalline thin-film GeSn phototransistor on a fused silica substrate with a Sn composition of ~10%, showing a photoresponse in the short-wave infrared wavelength range, critical for emerging sensing applications. This device shows a gate-tunable response, with responsivities approaching up to 1.7 mA/W with only a 30 nm-thick GeSn layer. Furthermore, phototransistors offer additional adaptability through gating, which allows for the reduction of dark current. This not only enhances the signal-to-noise ratio but also offers more flexible integration with various image sensor readout implementations using different substrates. The specific detectivity of this phototransistor is within an order of magnitude of those of previously reported GeSn photodetectors grown by molecular beam epitaxy and chemical vapor deposition, even though the absorber is 3 to 20× thinner while the electrode spacing for photocarrier transport is approximately 15× longer than the carrier diffusion length in this work, showing great potential benefits of extending similar device structures to epitaxial GeSn layers. As these GeSn phototransistors utilize a noncrystalline substrate, our work establishes a fundamentally more versatile path toward monolithically integrated GeSn-based photodetectors for next-generation multimodal sensors.
Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States); University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Scientific User Facilities (SUF)
Grant/Contract Number:
NA0003525; SC0023412
OSTI ID:
2524041
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2540244
Report Number(s):
SAND--2025-03206J
Journal Information:
ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, Journal Name: ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces Journal Issue: 10 Vol. 17; ISSN 1944-8244
Publisher:
American Chemical Society (ACS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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