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Signal Amplification and Leakage Current Suppression in Amorphous Silicon P-I-N Diodes by Field Profile Tailoring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

W.S. Hong ,
F. Zhong ,
A. Mireshghi  and
V. Perez-Mendez
W.S. Hong
Affiliation:
Physics Division and EngineeringDivision, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.
A. Mireshghi
Affiliation:
Sharif University, Tehran, Iran
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Abstract

The performance of amorphous silicon p-i-n diodes as radiation detectors in terms of signal amplitude can be greatly improved when there is a built-in signal gain mechanism. We describe an avalanche gain mechanism which is achieved by introducing stacked intrinsic, p-type, and n-type layers into the diode structure. We replaced the intrinsic layer of the conventional p-i-n diode with i1-p-i2-n-i3 multilayers. The i2 layer (typically 1~3 μm) achieves an electric field > 106 V/cm, while maintaining the p-i interfaces to the metallic contact at electric fields < 7 × 104 V/cm, when the diode is fully depleted. For use in photo-diode applications the whole structure is less than 10 μm thick. Avalanche gains of 10~50 can be obtained when the diode is biased to ~500 V. Also, dividing the electrodes to strips of 2 μm width and 20 μm pitch reduced the leakage current up to an order of magnitude, and increased light transmission without creating inactive regions.

Type
Research Article
Information
MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) , Volume 557: Symposium A – Amorphous and Heterogeneous Silicon Thin Films—Fundamentals to Devices—1999 , 1999 , 851
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 1999

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