Silicon distyryl-BODIPY hybrid photodiode: moving a step ahead from organic interface layer to type II band alignment

Organic-inorganic heterojunctions are becoming an attractive topic of research for their applications in hybrid photodetectors, solar cells, resistive switching memory devices etc. The easy chemical synthesis and low-cost fabrication for organic thin films come with the benefit of high light absorptivity, high fluorescence quantum yield and band gap tunability along with high charge carrier lifetime that could be combined with the existing silicon-based technology. In this aspect, various organic dyes utilised as an interfacial layer with silicon Schottky junction are reported earlier. However, the photo responses are quite limited. Here, in this report, a Type II Silicon/Distyryl-BODIPY p-n junction has been proposed as an organic-inorganic hybrid photodetector which has not been explored extensively yet. The transformation from a mere organic interfacial layer to band aligned junction enhances the charge carrier separation providing higher photo-responsive behaviour. With the simple spin-coating technique, the Distyryl-BODIPY derivative with phenolic functionalities is coated to fabricate the p-n junction diode. To further improve the performance, pyramidal surface texturization on silicon is deployed using wet chemical etching that supplements the light absorption with internal reflections. Both the devices have been investigated for their photo-response characteristic where a high photo-responsivity of 4353 A W ⁻¹ is attained for the textured device as compared to 118 A W ⁻¹ for the planar silicon device at a − 3 V bias with an ultra-high specific detectivity of 10 ¹² Jones and 10 ¹⁰ Jones respectively. The behaviours of interfacial states have been demonstrated using the capacitance (C), conductance (G) and series resistance (R _S ) vs voltage (V) curves at different frequencies. Further calculations of interfacial state density revealed the existence of 1000 times higher interfacial states in planar device leading to lower performance as compared to pyramidal device. The findings in this report suggest that dye-based organic-inorganic heterostructures find potential applications in photodetectors and other optoelectronic devices.