A kinetic approach to tunnelling at Schottky contacts

Abstract

In this paper, we present a semiclassical kinetic approach to tunnelling through potential barriers, which can be applied to the simulation of planar semiconductor devices. The proposed model includes thermionic emission currents at the metal-semiconductor interface as well as tunnelling currents together with the effect of barrier lowering. The considered scattering mechanisms are electron-phonon and electron-impurity interactions. The numerical scheme used is a combination of multicell methods with high-order shock-capturing algorithms. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed method, we present the characteristics of several silicon based Schottky barrier diodes.