A Comparison Of Iridium Silicide And Platinum Silicide Photodiodes

Abstract
The most promising technology for staring infrared focal plane arrays today is based on Schottky barrier detectors. The focal planes are fabricated using platinum silicide (PtSi) photosensors on a p-type silicon substrate. The wide availability of high quality, VLSI grade substrates makes arrays extremely uniform in photoresponse and relatively easy to fabricate. The current state of the art in staring focal planes is at more than 1/4 million detectors on a single chip in a (512x512) format'. Other arrays such as 39,0002 detectors (244x160) are two year old technology and 64,0003 detectors (256x256) have been developed in the last year. PtSi diodes for use as photodetectors have been in development for several years. However, there is a very large base of information available since these same diodes can also be used as high reliability interconnects for VLSI integrated circuits. Work on PtSi for interconnect diode structures has been ongoing since the early 1960's.