State of the art high-speed photodetectors for microwave photonics application

The paper reviews the recent advances in high-speed photodetectors based on A/sup 3/B/sup 5/ compounds for microwave photonics application. The two main trends in the evolution of the high speed photodetectors like improving of the bandwidth-efficiency product and increasing of the saturation current are discussed. The main types of the high-speed photodetectors such as p-i-n photodiodes, avalanche photodiodes, Schottky photodiodes, metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors, resonant-cavity-enhanced photodiodes, waveguide photodiodes, traveling-wave photodetectors, and velocity matched distributed photodetectors are considered.