Improved extraction of the activation energy of the leakage current in silicon p–n junction diodes

Abstract

An accurate method is proposed for the extraction of the activation energy ET from the volume generation current density JgA in silicon p–n junctions. It combines temperature-dependent current–voltage (I–V) and capacitance–voltage measurements on an array of diodes with different geometry, in order to separate the peripheral from the volume components. The JgA can be found from the volume leakage current by subtraction of the volume diffusion current JdA, which is calculated from the forward I–V characteristic. To derive the correct slope from an Arrhenius plot of the JgA, several additional corrections have been applied. One is the temperature dependence of the depletion width, which is derived from the corrected volume capacitance. The most important ET change is shown to come from the temperature dependence of the recombination lifetime.