Investigation of the depletion layer by scanning capacitance force microscopy with Kelvin probe force microscopy

Abstract

We have developed a scanning probe microscope (SPM) that combines atomic force microscopy (AFM) with both Kelvin probe force microscopy (KFM — to measure the surface potential) and scanning capacitance force microscopy (SCFM — to measure the differential capacitance). The surface physical characteristics of a commercial Si Schottky barrier diode (Si-SBD), with and without an applied reverse bias, were measured over the same area by our AFM/KFM/SCFM system. We thus investigated the discrete power device by calculating the depletion-layer width and drawing an energy-band diagram.