Tunneling through thin oxide interface layers in a-Si:H Schottky diodes

A detailed study of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) surfaces before and after thermal and plasma oxidation treatments was carried out using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The thickness of the surface oxides is correlated with the electrical properties of corresponding Mo Schottky barrier structures. Oxide layers up to 1.5 nm in thickness cause a decrease of the reverse current of nearly two orders in magnitude, while the forward current is hardly affected. For oxide thicknesses above 2.0 nm a large reduction in the forward current is observed. Surprisingly, the associated tunneling probabilities of the oxide interface layers in the a-Si:H Schottky diodes are the same as those previously reported for c-Si-based tunnel diodes. Tunneling in the a-Si:H devices cannot be simply described by the properties of a rectangular barrier, which is adopted most frequently in these studies. A potential form where the barrier height increases quadratically with thickness fits the observed tunneling characteristics more quantitatively, both in absolute magnitude and oxide-thickness dependence of the tunnel current.