Electrical characterisation of high energy C-12 irradiated Au/n-GaAs Schottky Barrier Diodes

Au/n-GaAs Schottky Barrier Diodes (SBDs) have been fabricated on LEC grown silicon doped (1 0 0) GaAs single crystals. The SBDs were irradiated by 70 MeV high energy carbon ions with various ion fluences of 1 x 10(11), 1 x 10 (12) and 1 x 10(13) ions cm(-2). Current-voltage (I-V) and capacitance-volt age (C-V) characteristics of unirradiated and irradiated diodes were analys ed. The change in reverse leakage current increases with increasing ion flu ence. This is due to the irradiation induced defects at the interface and i ts increase with the fluence. The diodes were annealed at different tempera tures (473, 573 and 673 K) to study the effect of annealing. The rectifying behavior of the irradiated SBDs improves as the annealing temperature incr eases. But at 673 K, the diode behavior has been deteriorated irrespective of the fluences. Better enhancement in barrier height and also improvement in the ideality factor has been observed at the annealing temperature of 57 3 K. A decrease in the capacitance has been observed with increasing fluenc e. For the irradiated and annealed SBDs, the increase in capacitance has be en observed. Scanning Electron Microscopic analysis was carried on the irra diated samples to delineate the projected range and to observe defects indu ced by high energy carbon irradiation. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All r ights reserved.