Growing Technology and Electro-Physical Characteristics of Solid Solutions PbSnTe, PbSnSe and CdHdTe

Abstract

As it was mentioned before, the recent advancements in IR remote sensing became possible due to successful development of high quality photo-detecting devices at the wavelengths of atmospheric transparency. For instance, originally the high sensitivity photo-detecting devices (D* ≥ 10¹⁰ - 10¹¹ cmHz ^1/2/W) for the spectral range up to 5 µm were produced with PbS, PbSe, and PbTe materials and later using InSb and InAs (Fig. 3). However, due to the progress in laser communications technology, it became necessary to introduce the avalanche photo-detectors on the basis of Si (λ_m ≈ 1.02 µm) and In _x Ga1-x As (λ = 0.8 — 0.9 µm, (λ_m = 13 - 6 µm [32, 71]) to support the increased demands in bandwidth capacity.