Dislocation-assisted tunnelling of charge carriers across the Schottky barrier on the hydride vapour phase epitaxy grown GaN

Abstract

Barrier height and Ideality factor of Ni/n-GaN Schottky diodes are measured by performing temperature dependent current-voltage measurements. The measured value of barrier height is found to be much smaller than the theoretically calculated Schottky-Mott barrier height for the Ni/n-GaN diodes. Furthermore, a high value of ideality factor (>2) is measured at low temperatures. In order to understand these results, we need to consider a double Gaussian distribution of barrier height where the two components are related to the thermionic emission and thermionic filed emission mediated by dislocation-assisted tunnelling of carriers across the Schottky barrier. Thermionic emission is seen to dominate at temperatures higher than 170 K while the dislocation-assisted tunnelling dominates at low temperatures. The value of characteristic tunnelling energy measured from the forward bias current-voltage curves also confirms the dominance of dislocation-assisted tunnelling at low temperatures which is strongly corroborated by the Hall measurements. However, the value of characteristic tunnelling energy for high temperature range cannot be supported by the Hall results. This discrepancy can be eliminated by invoking a two layer model to analyse the Hall data which confirms that the charged dislocations, which reach the sample surface from the layer-substrate interface, provide an alternate path for the transport of carriers. The dislocation-assisted tunnelling of carriers governs the values of Schottky diode parameters at low temperature and the same is responsible for the observed inhomogeneity in the values of barrier height. The present analysis is applicable wherever the charge transport characteristics are severely affected by the presence of a degenerate layer at GaN-Sapphire interface and dislocations lines pierce the Schottky junction to facilitate the tunnelling of carriers.