Fabrication and Its Characteristics of HgCdTe Infrared Detector

HgCdTe를 이용한 Infrared Detector의 제조와 특성

HgCdTe Is the most versatile material for the developing infrared devices. Not like III-V compound semiconductors or silicon-based photo-detecting materials, HgCdTe has unique characteristics such as adjustable bandgap, very high electron mobility, and large difference between electron and hole mobilities. Many research groups have been interested in this material since early 70's, but mainly due to its thermodynamic difficulties for preparing materials, no single growth technique is appreciated as a standard growth technique in this research field. Solid state recrystallization(SSR), travelling heater method(THM), and Bridgman growth are major techniques used to grow bulk HgCdTe material. Materials with high quality and purity can be grown using these bulk growth techniques, however, due to the large separation between solidus and liquidus line on the phase diagram, it is very difficult to grow large materials with minimun defects. Various epitaxial growth techniques were adopted to get large area HgCdTe and among them liquid phase epitaxy(LPE), metal organic chemical vapor deposition(MOCVD), and molecular beam epitaxy(MBE) are most frequently used techniques. There are also various types of photo-detectors utilizing HgCdTe materials, and photovoltaic and photoconductive devices are most interested types of detectors up to these days. For the larger may detectors, photovoltaic devices have some advantages over power-requiring photoconductive devices. In this paper we reported the main results on the HgCdTe growing and characterization including LPE and MOCVD, device fabrication and its characteristics such as single element and linear array($8{\times}1$ PC, $128{\times}1$ PV and 4120{\times}1$ PC). Also we included the results of the dewar manufacturing, assembling, and optical and environmental test of the detectors.