Silicon-on-Insulator technology for imaging and application to a switching photodetector

This paper analyzes some advantages of Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) based photodetectors for low light imaging. It shows that SOI based sensors not only solve the bulk carriers problem, it can also act as a very selective spectral filter by acting as a resonant cavity, which is useful in application with a very narrow spectrum of interest, such as bioluminescence imaging. The SOI implementation of a switching photodetector based with an hybrid MOS-PN structure is presented and its advantages in terms of dark current minimization and SNR improvement highlighted.