Silicon photomultiplier with lateral Bulk-Si quenching resistors

A new structure of silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is presented, where lateral bulk-Si resistors was introduced to replace the conventional poly-Si quenching resistors. The replacement can not only eliminate the poly-Si related fabrication process, but also greatly reduce the area of metal wires. Thus the fill factor of the device can be increased noticeably. Furthermore, due to the separation of the contact region and the active region, the quantum efficiency of the device can also be improved, especially for light with visible or ultraviolet wavelengths. The functionality of the device proposed and its performance improvements have been confirmed by numerical simulation. The quantum efficiency at 300nm wavelength increases from 20% to 86%. Therefore, SiPM devices with very high photon detection efficiency will be very likely to be achieved.