SPIKING IN A SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICE - EXPERIMENTS AND COMPARISON WITH AMODEL

Silicon p(+)-n(+)-p-n(-) devices exhibit periodic and nonperiodic self -organized current oscillations. it is shown that the oscillations are caused either by spatiotemporal spiking of a current filament which d ecays immediately after its generation or by homogeneous relaxation os cillations of the current density. Moreover, the experiments give clea r evidence for complex spatiotemporal spiking, i.e., a filament emerge s and vanishes in. an irregular temporal sequence. A comparison with a simple model reveals good qualitative agreement with the observed bif urcation scenarios.