Analysis of Reverse-Bias Leakage Current Mechanisms in MetalGaN Schottky Diodes.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Condensed Matter Physics Volume 2010, Article ID 526929, 7 pages doi:10.1155/2010/526929 Research Article Analysis of Reverse-Bias Leakage Current Mechanisms in Metal/GaN Schottky Diodes P. Pipinys and V. Lapeika Department of Physics, Vilnius Pedagogical University, 08106 Vilnius, Lithuania Correspondence should be addressed to V. Lapeika, vytautas.lapeika@vpu.lt Received 13 May 2010; Accepted 28 July 2010 ¨ Academic Editor: Jorg Fink Copyright © 2010 P. Pipinys and V. Lapeika. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Temperature-dependent reverse-bias current-voltage characteristics obtained by other researchers for Schottky diodes fabricated on GaN are reinterpreted in terms of phonon-assisted tunneling (PhAT) model. Temperature dependence of reverse-bias leakage current is shown could be caused by the temperature dependence of electron tunneling rate from traps in the metal-semiconductor interface to the conduction band of semiconductor. A good fit of experimental data with the theory is received in a wide temperature range (from 80 K to 500 K) using for calculation the effective mass of 0.222 me . and for the phonon energy the value of 70 meV. The temperature and bias voltages dependences of an apparent barrier height (activation energy) are also explicable in the framework of the PhAT model. 1. Introduction hopping conduction. However, for the fitting of the experi- mental dat