Abstract
Graphene is of great scientific and commercial interest due to its unique physical properties, including exceptionally high carrier mobility and light transparency over a wide wavelength range. Graphene forms a heterojunction with silicon, which can result in a Schottky barrier diode with a depletion region that extends into the silicon. These diodes can act as photodetectors because photons entering the depletion region generate electron-hole pairs, which are separated and contribute to a photocurrent. Although graphene-silicon Schottky photodiodes (GSSDs) have been investigated for over a decade, their maturity for commercial application has yet to be demonstrated. Here, we applied industry-standard semiconductor encapsulation techniques to our GSSDs and investigated devices in commercially available packages. Our GSSDs show significantly higher responsivities in the ultraviolet spectrum than commercially available silicon photodetectors before and after packaging. Moreover, packaged GSSDs greatly outperform commercial gallium nitride photodetectors and match the responsivities of silicon carbide photodiodes in the ultraviolet (UV) range. The packaged devices additionally underwent three industrial lifetime stress tests. They showed stable dark- and photocurrents for over 900 h, passing the harsh conditions of industrial stress tests. Overall, our results demonstrate the potential of GSSDs as promising alternatives to conventional photodiodes.
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Acknowledgements
This work received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under the Graphene Flagship Core 3 (881603), by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF, within the GIMMIK project (03XP0210), and by the German Research Foundation (INST 221/96-1). We thank Dr. Dirck Sowada and Anika Kühnle for their technical support with the optical characterizations, and Michael Baumann for his assistance with packaging the GSSDs.
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M.C.L. and H.D.B.G. conceived the experiments. A.E. fabricated the devices. A.E., C.G., and J.A. performed the optoelectronic measurements and material characterization. M.C.L. and H.D.B.G. supervised the work. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the preparation of the manuscript. A.E. and C.G. wrote the initial manuscript and prepared the figures. All authors revised the manuscript.
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Esteki, A., Gebauer, C.P., Avci, J. et al. High UV sensitivity in graphene-silicon Schottky photodiodes in industry standard packaging. npj 2D Mater Appl (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41699-026-00678-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41699-026-00678-1
