Abstract

Pulse recovery time in semiconducting devices depends strongly on minority carrier lifetime, bandgap-type-dependent recombination, impurity concentration, and subband placement. In indirect bandgap solids, such as silicon, it is dominated by Shockley–Reed–Hall (SRH) recombination via trap-based recombination centers yielding slow recombination. The sluggish recombination then limits the pulse repetition rate and consequently the average power to a load. For decades, fabrication and irradiation techniques, such as Au- and Pt-diffusion, and energized electron-, proton-, and alpha particle-beam bombardment have been used to adjust minority carrier lifetime in silicon. These techniques generate shallow- and/or deep-level lattice defects to promote/retard trap-assisted SRH recombination. Despite investigating the characteristics of the generated defects on target material, the prior-art falls short in comprehensively addressing their effects on device-level architecture, specifically photoconductive switching devices. In this work, the effect of proton irradiation-induced localized crystal defect clusters on minority carrier lifetime in silicon photoconductive semiconductor switches is investigated when bombarded with 2.5–5 MeV beam energies with fluences between 9 × 1012–11 × 1013 cm−2 at room temperature. Photo-illuminated recovery characteristics for proton-beam (p-beam) irradiated device models with three distinct defect profiles have been studied using Silvaco TCAD and results have been compared with the electron-beam (e-beam) irradiation model with three different distinct defect profiles. At 30× lower defect density, recovery time trends in the p-beam irradiated device model were seen to be on the same order of magnitude as the e-beam irradiated model. At similar defect densities (1 × 1016 cm−3), the profile with a uniformly distributed bulk defect profile performed 10× better from a recovery time viewpoint compared with the e-beam irradiation. Furthermore, three orders of magnitude reduction in leakage currents were noticed in p-beam irradiated models.

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