Traveling-wave photodetectors with high power-bandwidth and gain-bandwidth product performance

Traveling-wave photodetectors (TWPDs) are an attractive way to simultaneously maximize external quantum efficiency, electrical bandwidth, and maximum unsaturated output power. We review recent advances in TWPDs. Record high-peak output voltage together with ultrahigh-speed performance has been observed in low-temperature-grown GaAs (LTG-GaAs)-based metal-semiconductor-metal TWPDs at the wavelengths of 800 and 1300 nm. An approach to simultaneously obtain high bandwidth and high external efficiency is a traveling-wave amplifier-photodetector (TAP detector) that combines gain and absorption in either a sequential or simultaneous traveling-wave structure.