Comparative study on strain induced electrical properties modulation of Si p-n junctions

Abstract

Understanding the p-n junctions is of great importance because p-n junctions are the essential elements of semiconductor devices. In this study, we experimentally investigated the strain induced electrical properties modulation of Si p+-n and n+-p junctions. It is found that, under the uniaxial tensile stress, the current in the large-forward-bias region increases significantly, while a rather small current increase is observed in the diffusion-current-dominant region. Besides, the ideality factors in the diffusion-current-dominant region and the large-forward-bias region decrease when the amount of the applied stress increases. The observations are explained by the strain induced variations in energy band structure, their effect on minority carrier concentrations, and the piezoresistance effect. © 2013 American Institute of Physics.