Hot carrier silicon phototransistor
Steponas P. Asmontas, Jonas Gradauskas, Edmundas Širmulis · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1991
The photoelectric characteristics of silicon phototransistors are investigated. The device consists of three regions with different types of conductivity. The operation of the phototransistor is based on the hot carrier emission from the emitter into the base under IR laser irradiation. The current-voltage measurements on the emitter-base junction show that photo-induced current increases with the increase of forward bias voltage and decreases when reverse bias is applied. The characteristics of the collector photocurrent versus the collector- base voltage in the common-base configuration are very similar to static collector current vs the collector voltage characteristics of an ordinary bipolar transistor. Furthermore, the collector photocurrent increases with an exponential law when the emitter-base junction is forward biased.