Analytical description of mixed ohmic and space-charge-limited conduction in single-carrier devices

R�hr, Jason A.; MacKenzie, Roderick C. I.

Abstract

While space-charge-limited current measurements are often used to characterize charge-transport in relatively intrinsic, low-mobility semiconductors, it is currently difficult to characterize lightly or heavily doped semiconductors with this method. By combining the theories describing ohmic and space-charge-limited conduction, we derive a general analytical approach to extract the charge-carrier density, the conduction-band edge and the drift components of the current density-voltage curves of a single-carrier device when the semiconductor is either undoped, lightly doped or heavily doped. The presented model covers the entire voltage range, i.e., both the low-voltage regime and the Mott-Gurney regime. We demonstrate that there is an upper limit to how doped a device must be before the current density-voltage curves are significantly affected, and we show that the background charge-carrier density must be considered to accurately model the drift component in the low-voltage regime, regardless of whether the device is doped or not. We expect that the final analytical expressions presented herein to be directly useful to experimentalists studying charge transport in novel materials and devices.

Citation

Röhr, J. A., & MacKenzie, R. C. I. (2020). Analytical description of mixed ohmic and space-charge-limited conduction in single-carrier devices. Journal of Applied Physics, 128(16), Article 165701. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0024737

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 9, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Oct 26, 2020
• Publication Date: Oct 28, 2020
• Deposit Date: Oct 23, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 26, 2020
• Journal: Journal of Applied Physics
• Print ISSN: 0021-8979
• Electronic ISSN: 1089-7550
• Publisher: American Institute of Physics
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 128
• Issue: 16
• Article Number: 165701
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0024737
• Keywords: General Physics and Astronomy
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4984676
• Publisher URL: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0024737
• Additional Information: The following article has been accepted by Journal of Applied Physics. After it is published, it will be found at https://aip.scitation.org/journal/jap