Electrical behavior of n-GaAs based Schottky diode for different contacts: Temperature dependence of current-voltage

We report on the electrical behavior of Metal/n-GaAs Schottky structure, using Silvaco-Atlas software. To study the effect of metal work function phi(m) on the performance of various parameters such as saturation current I-s, ideality factor n, and barrier height phi(b), we examine a large number of contact materials having different phi(m) at room temperature (300 K). The results show a significant dependence between phi(m) and the electrical parameters. It is observed that the smaller values of the threshold voltage V-i are obtained for low phi(m). We also find that metals within phi(m) is an element of [4.42-5.31] eV give lower n. A linear increase of the barrier height phi(b) is mentioned for phi(m) is an element of [4.33-5.37] which is in accordance with the theoretical relationship. In addition, the selection of four different metal contact (Cu, Au, Pt, and Ni) is devoted to simulate the Metal/n-GaAs Schottky structure in a wide temperature range of (100-400 K). This allows us to extract and discuss the influence of temperature on the performance of our proposed device.