Monte Carlo Simulations of Electron Transport Characteristics of Ternary Carbide Al4SiC4

Abstract

Electron transport characteristics of a novel wide band gap ternary carbide, Al4SiC4, to be used for efficient power and optoelectronic applications, are predicted using ensemble Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The MC simulations use a mixture of material parameters obtained from density functional theory (DFT) calculations and experiment, with a preference for the experimental data if they are known. The DFT calculations predict a band gap of 2.48 eV, while the experimental measurements give a band gap between 2.78 and 2.8 eV. We have found that the electron effective mass in the two lowest valleys (M and K) is highly anisotropic; in the K valley, mt* = 0.5678 me and ml* = 0.6952 me, and for the M valley, mt* = 0.9360 me and ml* = 1.0569 me. We simulate electron drift velocity and electron mobility as a function of applied electric field as well as electron mobility as a function of doping concentration in Al4SiC4. We predict a peak electron drift velocity of 1.35 × 107 cm s–1 at an electric field of 1400 ...