Authors:
Naser Pour Aryan
and
Albrecht Rothermel
Affiliation:
University of Ulm, Germany
Keyword(s):
Dark Current, Epitaxy Process, Photodiode, Retinal Illuminance, Subretinal Chip.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Vision
;
Biomedical Optics
;
Optical Instrumentation
;
Optics
;
Photonic and Optoelectronic Materials and Devices
;
Photonics
;
Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology
;
Photorefractive Effects, Materials, and Devices
Abstract:
Photodiodes are important elements in subretinal visual stimulation chips (Rao et al., 2006; Rothermel et al., 2009). This paper quantifies the advantages of using a process involving a low photodiode dark current per unit area for fabricating these devices. Such a technology needs an epitaxy process to optimize the substrate material lattice properties as also mentioned in (Cinguino et al., 1985) and (Inada et al., 2009). In the following we show that the illumination on the retina is in a range that an epitaxy process ensuring low dark current becomes beneficial. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind in open literature.