IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON NANOTECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO. 6,NOVEMBER 2012 1087 Particle Accelerator Using Optical Tweezer for Photodetector Performance Improvement Suzairi Daud, Surada Ueamanapong, Itsara Srithanachai, Amporn Poyai, Surasak Niemcharoen, Jalil Ali, and Preecha P. Yupapin Abstract—A photodetector performance improvement tech- nique using a particle accelerator in the modified add-drop optical filter is proposed. An optical tweezer is used to control the electron movement within the device, where an electron (particle) can be accelerated and moved faster than the normal condition, where finally the silicon bulk defects and diode performance degradation can be solved. In simulation, a PANDA microring is configured by a modified add-drop filter that can be used to increase the electron speed. In operation, the trapped electrons in a diode can be trapped, controlled, and transported from anode to cathode contacts. In the design system, the trapping probe can be adjusted to fit the atom size from 200 pm (picometer) to 1.4 nm (nanometer) by controlling the ring parameters. The goal of this paper is to present the use of a PANDA microring for photodetector performance improvement, which can be used for many applications. Index Terms—Hybrid electronics, molecular accelerator, optical tweezer, particle accelerator. I. INTRODUCTION T HE P-N junction is an important structure in semiconduc- tor devices. P-N diodes have been widely used in many ap- plications for more than three decades as in optoelectronics [1], oxygen sensors [2], power devices [3], and photodetector [4], [5]. The P-N diode characteristics in ideal case have high speed and use low power. However, the real devices during fabrication degradation have been produced in the form of defects or cluster in silicon bulk due to high-energy process. The interstitial cluster mechanism is believed to be occurred in ion-implanted silicon bulk including di-interstitial, interstitial chain, rod defect, and dislocation loop. These types of defects have strong influence Manuscript received April 17, 2012; revised June 26, 2012; accepted July 24, 2012. Date of publication August 7, 2012; date of current version Novem- ber 16, 2012. This work was supported in part by the University Technology Malaysia under Research Grant Tier 1/Flagship, in part by MyBrain15 Fel- lowship/Ministry of Higher Education under Skim Latihan Akademik (SLAI) Fellowship, and in part by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) research grant. The review of this paper was arranged by Associate Editor J. T. W. Yeow. S. Daud and J. Ali are with the Institute of Advanced Photonics Science, Nan- otechnology Research Alliance, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru 81310, Malaysia (e-mail: suzairi_87@yahoo.com; jalilali@utm.my). S. Ueamanapong, I. Srithanachai, and S. Niemcharoen are with the Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok 10520, Thailand (e-mail: usurada@gmail.com; srithanachai@gmail.com; knsurasa@kmitl.ac.th). A. Poyai is with the Thai Microelectronics Center (TMEC) Chachoengsao 24000, Thailand (e-mail: amporn.poyai@nectec.or.th). P. P. Yupapin is with Nanoscale Science and Engineering Research Al- liance, Faculty of Science, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkra- bang, Bangkok 10520, Thailand (e-mail: kypreech@kmitl.ac.th). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TNANO.2012.2211890 on switching time and leakage of current in semiconductor de- vices. In addition, the current of the P-N diode generated by electron moving from anode to cathode contacts is also affected by the defect present in silicon bulk. Defects in silicon bulk are produced due to high-energy ion implantation [6] and silicon wafer processing (Czochralski process) [7]. High density of de- fects in the bulk material causes decreasing speed, high-current leakage, low forward current, and high-energy consumption. At present a few techniques for improving the diode performance have been realized such as thermal annealing [8] and platinum dope [9]. However, this damage turns out to be difficult to re- move even after high-temperature annealing [10]. Although, the platinum dope technique can increase the speed of the device but the damage caused by the platinum process itself induces some defects [11]. In practice, device performance is limited by material prop- erty, where the improvement in the fabrication techniques is the real challenge. Instead of addressing the defect problems in ex- isting techniques, this paper presents a new method for increas- ing the device performance. To increase the device performance (i.e., particle or electron speed), the use of trapping and acceler- ating particles with optical tweezers is recommended, in which the performance of the device can be increased and controlled by the PANDA microring resonator. In manipulation, the PANDA microring resonator can generate optical tweezers for trapping and transport silicon atom/electron to the terminal contacts. By this technique, electron can be driven to the contacts without regarding to generate defects in silicon bulk. Moreover, the use of a PANDA microring is also found in many applications such as photonics microdevice [12], hybrid transistor [13], therapeu- tic [14], and telephone networks [15]. In this paper, the trapping toll generation is reviewed and the new design system for par- ticle accelerator is described. Finally, simulation results using commercial MATLAB are demonstrated, where all parameters are used closely to the practical fabricated device. It is found that the electron speed can be increased 3 × 10 5 times. II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND By using dark-bright soliton pulses propagating within a mod- ified add/drop optical multiplexer (PANDA microring), which was proposed by the authors in reference [13], the trapping tools can be formed and used to trap molecules/atoms [16], [17]. In this study, the multiplexed signals with slightly differ- ent wavelengths of the dark solitons are controlled and ampli- fied within the system. The dynamic behaviors of dark bright soliton interaction are also analyzed and described. Finally, the use of optical switching to build a P-N photodetector using the 1536-125X/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE