PERFORMANCE OF THE MULTIQUANTUM-WELL INFRARED PHOTODETECTOR

A theoretical study of the performance of the multiquantum well infrar ed photodetector is carried out in this article. We first calculate th e current response and dark current as a function of bias voltage and temperature within the sequential tunneling approach. Then we discuss in detail the noise characteristics of such a detector. The influence of the background radiation is also considered. The calculated detecti vity D(lambda) is consistent with that found in experiments. It is sh own that the detector is generally background limited at temperature l ower than about 80 K with a D(lambda) of order 10(10) cm Hz1/2/W.