A critically coupled Germanium photodetector under vertical illumination.

We propose and study a practical design of a Germanium photodetector implemented on a Silicon-on-insulator substrate to reach the critical coupling regime under vertical illumination at 1310 nm wavelength. With appropriate optimization procedures, a high efficiency bandwidth product larger than 50 GHz and a large 3dB spectral full width around 30 nm can be obtained given realistic material parameters and fabrication constraints. Our device is fully compatible to the state-of-art CMOS process technology, and may serve as a high performance, low cost solution for the optical receiver in Silicon photonics based optical interconnects. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America