Polarization-engineered GaN/InGaN/GaN tunnel diodes

By S. Krishnamoorthy, D. Nath, F. Akyol, P. Park, M. Esposto, S. Rajan. 2010

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on the design and demonstration of polarization-engineered GaN/InGaN/GaN tunnel junction diodes with high current density and low tunneling turn-on voltage. Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin calculations were used to model and design tunnel junctions with narrow band gap InGaN-based barrier layers. N-polar p-GaN/In0.33Ga0.67N/n-GaN heterostructure tunnel diodes were grown using molecular beam epitaxy. Efficient interband tunneling was achieved close to zero bias with a high current density of 118 A/cm2 at a reverse bias of 1 V, reaching a maximum current density up to 9.2 kA/cm2. These results represent the highest current density reported in III-nitride tunnel junctions and demonstrate the potential of III-nitride tunnel devices for a broad range of optoelectronic and electronic applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e303ca3ae0ebb90808f8311b6f3a64f08a4719d