Influence of temperature on electron transport in bipolar devices

We evaluate the inelastic electron lifetime in the p regions of III-V semiconductor devices with the aid of the exact temperature-dependent random phase approximation valence-band dielectric function. Our results demonstrate that at room temperature the low-energy electron lifetime decreases markedly while hot-electron lifetimes are reduced by several tens of percent. We subsequently repeat our calculations with the damped plasmon pole approximation for the dielectric function, obtaining acceptable values with a minimum of computational effort.