Back to Search Start Over

1039 kA/cm2 peak tunneling current density in GaN-based resonant tunneling diode with a peak-to-valley current ratio of 1.23 at room temperature on sapphire substrate

Authors :
LanXing Li
Fang Liu
JiaJia Yao
Yue Hao
ZhiPeng Sun
ZuMao Li
Jincheng Zhang
XueYan Yang
YongRui Fu
JunShuai Xue
GuanLin Wu
HePeng Zhang
Zhihong Liu
Source :
Applied Physics Letters. 119:153506
Publication Year :
2021
Publisher :
AIP Publishing, 2021.

Abstract

In this Letter, we present the excellent negative differential resistance (NDR) characteristics of AlN/GaN double-barrier resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) in which the active layers are grown by molecular beam epitaxy on thick GaN-on-sapphire templates manufactured by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition. Here, indium flux is introduced as surfactant to reduce the interface roughness and improve the sharpness of heterointerface during epitaxial growth of AlN/GaN/AlN quantum well. The processed device with a top collector diameter of 1 μm size demonstrates a record peak current density of 1039 kA/cm2 while simultaneously featuring a peak-to-valley current ratio of 1.23 at room temperature, excellent achievements among all the reported GaN-based RTDs on any substrates. In addition, no degradation of device performance together with free of hysteresis is observed for the 1000 times consecutive up-to-down voltage sweeps under forward bias. These remarkable achievements are attributed to the marked improvement in heterointerface quality of AlN/GaN/AlN double-barrier quantum well by adopting indium as surfactant during epitaxial growth as clarified by transmission electron microscopy analysis, which dramatically suppresses the interface roughness scattering and elements interdiffusion, thus significantly improving the NDR signatures in current–voltage curves. The obtained results in this work illustrate that indium-surfactant added epitaxy technique turns out to be a promising approach for the modulation of vertical electron resonant tunneling in III-nitride heterostructures and realization of highly reproducible and reliable AlN/GaN double-barrier RTDs, in favor of implementation for future high-power solid-state electronics operating in terahertz spectra.

Details

ISSN :
10773118 and 00036951
Volume :
119
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Applied Physics Letters
Accession number :
edsair.doi...........8efe1af0f7fc2053493e1fe44782260b
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0064790