Minority carrier lifetimes using compensated differental open circuit voltage decay

Abstract

Minority carrier lifetimes in semiconductor diodes can be measured by suddenly terminating forward diode current and observing the consequent decay of diode voltage. While this open circuit voltage decay (OCVD) method is very simple in principle, departures of the observed decay curves from the predicted linear relationship cause the method to be subjective and unreliable in practice. This paper describes simple improvements to this method which largely overcome these difficulties. These improvements are based on the passive differentiation of the open circuit decay curve and compensation for the effects causing departures of this curve from linearity.