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2025

High-performance III-V family infrared detectors

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Since the advent of infrared detectors in the 1940s, their technological framework has undergone a leapfrog development, with significant advances in both device types and performance. Entering the 21st century, the industry’s demand for infrared detectors that are “small-sized, lightweight, low-power, low-cost, and high-performance (SWaP³)” has continued to intensify, further driving ongoing innovation in sensitive materials and device architectures. III-V compound semiconductor materials—such as GaAs, InP, GaSb, InAs, InSb, and their multi-component alloys—possess advantages including high carrier mobility, excellent chemical stability, strong lattice compatibility, and tunable band gaps. Infrared detectors fabricated from these materials can cover multiple spectral bands, including short-wave infrared, mid-wave infrared, and long-wave infrared, and exhibit outstanding detection performance. As a result, they have attracted increasing attention in recent years—particularly the InAs/GaSb Type-II superlattice, which has become the most closely watched infrared detector material system after mercury cadmium telluride (HgCdTe). This course first provides an overview of the fundamental knowledge of III-V infrared detectors, then delves into the latest research advances in various high-performance III-V infrared detectors, and finally introduces the single-pixel micro-infrared spectrometer—the p-graded-n micro-spectrometer structure, first proposed internationally.

A single-pixel smart microspectrometer based on an AlGaAs/GaAs graded-bandgap PN-junction detector—this spectrometer, combined with the Neural Spectral Fields (NSF) spectral reconstruction method, achieves high optical sensitivity, high spectral accuracy, and high spectral resolution in its measurements.

Recently, Professor Chen Biale’s team has achieved a significant breakthrough in the field of high-speed optoelectronic detectors: The waveguide-based single-carrier optoelectronic detector they developed simultaneously realizes an ultra-wide bandwidth exceeding 200 GHz and an external quantum efficiency of 0.81 A/W. Moreover, with a “bandwidth–efficiency product” of 133.5 GHz, the team has set a new world record, successfully overcoming the long-standing challenge of balancing bandwidth and efficiency in this field. This achievement provides a critical device solution for next-generation single-channel optical interconnects capable of 400 Gbps and even 800 Gbps data rates, while also laying an important foundation for high-speed, low-power 6G and terahertz communications.

Beijing Institute of Technology Review: Infrared Detectors for In-Memory Sensing and Computing

Lensless Imaging: The Camera's Coding Magic

Beijing Institute of Technology Review: Infrared Detectors for In-Memory Sensing and Computing

Lensless Imaging: The Camera's Coding Magic