Light-controllable room temperature negative differential resistance in deep-trench type nitride–oxide tunneling device and its applications

Abstract

This study presents the room-temperature operation of deep-trench type nitride–oxide metal–insulator–semiconductor three-terminal tunneling devices which were fabricated by a standard metal–oxide–semiconductor process. It is instructive to observe a photoinduced N-type negative differential resistance (NDR) with a high peak-to-valley current ratio for device operated under negative polysilicon node bias under tungsten lamp illumination. An explanation was provided for the NDR phenomenon with proper three-terminal biasing. The sudden current drop under light illumination was caused by the sudden reduction of the two-carrier conduction due to Esaki band-to-band tunneling. The NDR amplitude could be modulated by light intensity. The position of the NDR current peak was tunable at different voltages with different p-well biases. The optoelectronic response of nitride–oxide devices we investigate here may open an application window for the nitride–oxide system in silicon-based optoelectronic integrated circuits, wireless communications, and future quantum devices.

Negative differential resistance in photoassisted field emission from Si nanowires

“…In this work, we test new ideas targeting the promotion of oscillatory (pulsed) emission during field-emission (FE) of low-doped semiconducting nanowires (NWs) under continuous laser excitation. This research builds upon the welldeveloped field of high-speed oscillating devices 11 with notorious examples such as the transferred-electron devices in the momentum space, also called the Gunn diode 12 , or in the real-space using heterostructures 13 , with examples such as the resonant tunneling double barrier diodes (DBDs) 14 and the quantum-well (QW) p-i-n photo-diodes 15 . A low-doped semiconducting channel is usually inserted in the core of these device structure to enable charge fluctuations induced by the electric field, and this gives rise during operation to domains of excess (negative) and depleted (positive) electrons within the channel 16 .…”