Short Notes K223

phys. stat. sol. (a) -

93, K223(1986)
Subject classification: 7 3 . 3 0 ; S 5 . 1 1
University of aryland, Electrical Engineering Department,
College P a r k1Y(a) and
Solarex Corporation, Rockville') (b)
On the B a r r i e r Height of Al/p-Si Schottky Diodes
BY
D. E. IOANNOU (a), Y. J . HUANG (a), P.K. MC LARTY (a), and
S. M. JOHIUSON (b)

During the past s e v e r a l y e a r s there h a s been a renewed interest in Schottky

diodes, especially in the mech2,nisms of the barrier formation, as is evidenced
by-the l a r g e number of current publications /1 to 3/. In the case of Schottky
diodes on p-type silicon it was established in the past /4/ that various metals
(including aluminum) deposited on carefully treated, undamaged sample s u r -
faces, produced r a t h e r leaky, low barrier height diodes. Recently, however,
Ashok and Giewont /5/ reported that they obtained very l a r g e b a r r i e r height
( 0 . 8 3 ev), nearly ideal (n = 1.08) Al/p-Si Schottky diodes, by implanting the
surface with 10 keV Ar' (doses to 1015 c m - 5 and subsequently with
0.4 keV H+ (dose cm-'), prior t c aluminum deposition. The above authors
have not offered a n explanation of this rather unexpected result, but the r e -
sulting surface damage must play a n important r o l e in the formation of the
barrier .
In this report, we present s i m i l a r experimental data, obtained from the
study of aluminum/p-type polycrystalline silicon Schottky diodes. The starting
material, obtained f r o m Solarex C o r p . , was boron doped to 1 0 l 6 ~ m - ~ ) ,
and known to contain a l a r g e number of bulk and surface structural defects /6/.
The fabrication p r x e d u r e was s i m i l a r to that in our previous work /7k F i r s t
ohmic contacts were fabricated by evaporating a layer of 2% Ga-Au on the back
sample surface, and then heating it a t 550 OC in nitrogen for 1 0 min. Following
this, the s u r f a c e was thoroughly cleaned consecutively with trichlorethylene,
acetone, and methmol using a n ultrasonic bath, etching in diluted HF for 1 min
and washing in flowing deionized water. The specimen was then stored in

1) College P a r k , Maryland 2 0 7 4 2 , USA.

2) Rockville, Maryland 20 850, USA.
K224 physica status solidi (a) 9 3

I I I I I I

fig J
forward bins ( V ) ._ FIJ 2
2
reverse
4
610s ( V )
6

Fig. 1. I-U characteristics of a typical Al/p-type polycrystalline Si Schottky

diode. The room temperature saturation current is obtained by extrapolation,
Io% 5 ~ 1 0 A
-~
2
Fig. 2. 1/C plot for the diode of Fig. 1

methanol until it was taken into the vacuum chamber. The evaporations were
carried out resistively with a tungsten wire in a liquid-nitrogen-baffled oil-
-6
pumped vacuum system, the pressure being w 10 T o r r . Deposition of the
aluminium was through a n "out of contact" mask to give several circular films
(1 mm diameter), typically 100 mm thick, on the .same sample. It was im-
portant that a shutter would be interposed between the sample and the tungsten
wire until the aluminum had melted and evaporation started.
The above diodes (their characteristics shown in Fig. 1 and 2) showed ex-
cellent rectification, with very good ideality factor, n, and nearly voltage-in-
dependent r e v e r s e current. Fig. 1 shows a typical I-U curve of these diodes
from which the ideality factor is calculated to be n = 1.07. Also, using the ex-
pression for the saturation current /1/

the effective b a r r i e r height was calculated to be aB = 0.70 eV. This is quite

large, and although substantially smaller than Ashok and Giewont' s / 5 / value
( 0 . 8 3 ev), i t is nevertheless quite larger than the usual ~ 0 . 5 5eV /4/. The
Short Notes K225

barrier height was also obtained from the 1 MHz capacitance-voltage (CV)
2
characteristics, shown in Fig. 2, where we plot 1/C versus U for the diode
of Fig. 1. The intercept voltage is determined to be 0.74 V, giving a b a r r i e r
height of 0.95 eV,. which is larger than the effective b a r r i e r value determined
from the saturation current ( 0.70 ev) . This was also true for Ashok and
Giewont' s diodes /5/, and they speculated the possible reason for this dis-
crepancy to be the presence of a thin interfacial layer. Such a layer can usually
be detected by Scanning-Electron-Microscope Electron-Beam-Induced-Current
(SEM-EBIC) micrographs of the devices, due to i t s charging-up during the
electron irradiation /7/. W e obtained and examined SEM-EBIC micrographs
of our samples but failed to detect the presence of interfacial layers. In agree-
ment with Ashok and Giewont, we do not understand the reasons for both the
large b a r r i e r heights obtained and the discrepancy in the values obtained from
the two different measurement methods. The key to the understanding of these
rather unexpected results might be the surface structural defects, which in
Ashok and Giewont' s work a r e created by the A r + and H+ implantations, where-
a s in our work a r e present in the starting material /6/. This view is also
supported by the experimental results of Wu et al. /8/, and Mu and Fonash /9/.
Wu et al. studied the effects of grain boundaries on the electrical behavior of
Al-poly-Si Schottky-barrier solar cells. In their study, they observed that the
presence of low-angle boundaries leads to Schottky-barrier heights which a r e
consistently highe:r than the corresponding single-crystal diodes. Mu and
Fonash, on the other hand, obtained very large b a r r i e r heights on p-type
silicon samples which were dry-etched, and therefore contained large amounts
of surface structural defects.

References
/1/ E. H. RHODERICK, Metal-Semiconductor Contacts, Oxford University
P r e s s , 1978.
- 1157 (1985).
/2/ J. TERSOFF, J. Vacuum Sci. Technol. B3,
/3/ W.E. SPICER, N. NEWMAN, T. KENDELEWICZ, W.G. PETRO, M.D.
WILLIAMS, C.E. MC CANTS, and I. LINDAU, J. Vacuum Sci. Technol.
- 1178 (1985).
B3,
/4/ B.L. SMITH and E.H. RHODERICK, Solid State Electronics -
14, 71 (1971).
K226 physica status solidi (a) 93

/5/ S. ASHOK and K. GIEWONT, IEEE Electron Devices Letters -

6 , 462 (1985).
/6/ K.C. YOO, S. M. JOHNSON, and W. F . REGNAULT, J . appl. Phys. - 57,
2258 (1985).
/7/ D . E . IOANNOU and S.M. DAVIDSON, phys. stat. sol. (a) -
48, K1 (1978).
/8/ C.M. WU, E.S. YANG, W. HUANG, and H.C. CARD, IEEE Trans.
Electron Devices -
27, 687 (1980).
/9/ X.C. MU and S. J . FONASH, IEEE Electron Devices Letters -
6 , 410 (1985).

(Received November 29, 1985)