Authors:

Reagan McCafferty

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About Paper:

Ionizing radiation has been observed to induce structural defects known as traps in the crystalline structure of semiconductors. These traps affect electron emission throughout the material and may ultimately impact its performance and reliability in electronic devices. Understanding and modeling this phenomenon to inform breakdown understanding in semiconductors and improve mitigation through radiation-hardening techniques necessitates further characterization of the transitions between different electron emission phenomena. This paper expands on previous work unifying field emission (FE) and space charge limited emission (SCLE) in planar diodes through a third order nexus that defines the transitions between the Ford-Nordheim (FN) equation for FE, Child-Langmuir (CL) law for vacuum SCLE, and Mott-Gurney (MG) law for collisional SCLE. Traps are introduced into the nexus theory through the fundamental electron continuity equation and the Mark- Helfrich (MH) law governing emission in trap-filled solids. From this, we expect to derive exact solutions for current density as a function of voltage and yield a fourth order nexus curve linking FN, CL, MG, and MH as a function of trap density. Such a curve would help characterize diode performance under various conditions including ionizing radiation.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Reagan McCafferty