Platform-agnostic waveguide integration of high-speed photodetectors with evaporated tellurium thin films

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, platform-agnostic method for integrating high-speed, wide-band photodetectors onto various photonic chips using evaporated tellurium films, enabling detection across multiple wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces a low-temperature evaporation technique for tellurium that allows direct integration of high-performance photodetectors onto diverse photonic platforms.

Findings

Demonstrated detection at visible, telecom, and mid-infrared wavelengths.

Achieved bandwidth of over 40 GHz.

Enabled scalable integration with silicon, silicon nitride, and lithium niobate photonic structures.

Abstract

Many attractive photonics platforms still lack integrated photodetectors due to inherent material incompatibilities and lack of process scalability, preventing their widespread deployment. Here we address the problem of scalably integrating photodetectors in a photonic platform-independent manner. Using a thermal evaporation and deposition technique developed for nanoelectronics, we show that tellurium (Te), a quasi-2D semi-conductive element, can be evaporated at low temperature directly onto photonic chips to form air-stable, high-responsivity, high-speed, ultrawide-band photodetectors. We demonstrate detection at visible, telecom, and mid-infrared wavelengths, a bandwidth of more than 40 GHz, and platform-independent scalable integration with photonic structures in silicon, silicon nitride and lithium niobate.