Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Metal–semiconductor junction
Summary
In solid-state physics, a metal–semiconductor (M–S) junction is a type of electrical junction in which a metal comes in close contact with a semiconductor material. It is the oldest practical semiconductor device. M–S junctions can either be rectifying or non-rectifying. The rectifying metal–semiconductor junction forms a Schottky barrier, making a device known as a Schottky diode, while the non-rectifying junction is called an ohmic contact. (In contrast, a rectifying semiconductor–semiconductor junction, the most common semiconductor device today, is known as a p–n junction.)
Metal–semiconductor junctions are crucial to the operation of all semiconductor devices. Usually an ohmic contact is desired, so that electrical charge can be conducted easily between the active region of a transistor and the external circuitry.
Occasionally however a Schottky barrier is useful, as in Schottky diodes, Schottky transistors, and metal–semiconductor field effect transistors.
Whether a given metal-semiconductor junction is an ohmic contact or a Schottky barrier depends on the Schottky barrier height, ΦB, of the junction.
For a sufficiently large Schottky barrier height, that is, ΦB is significantly higher than the thermal energy kT, the semiconductor is depleted near the metal and behaves as a Schottky barrier. For lower Schottky barrier heights, the semiconductor is not depleted and instead forms an ohmic contact to the metal.
The Schottky barrier height is defined differently for n-type and p-type semiconductors (being measured from the conduction band edge and valence band edge, respectively). The alignment of the semiconductor's bands near the junction is typically independent of the semiconductor's doping level, so the n-type and p-type Schottky barrier heights are ideally related to each other by:
where Eg is the semiconductor's band gap.
In practice, the Schottky barrier height is not precisely constant across the interface, and varies over the interfacial surface.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.