Interfacial oxide defect mediated ballistic electron transport for ITO/p-Si contact

At moderately high field, the most frequent scattering events involve in carrier transport in semiconductor or solid, leading to the degradation of signal quality, limiting speed of devices. Ballistic transport is found to be an ideal mechanism in which carriers are not scattered [1][2][7]. The underlying heterostructure physics of Tin-doped Indium Oxide (ITO) on Si substrate is an interfacial formation which is relating to atomic placement. This may cause dislocations, vacancy defects at the interface, resulting in certain junction current voltage (I-V) characteristic. Herein, we report the I-V characteristic of as-deposited ITO/p-Si at relatively high temperature sputtering deposition (∼350 DC) that allow ballistic transport, whereas ohmic contact can be obtained at room temperature deposition, and Schottky contact behavior at relatively medium temperature deposition (∼200 DC). The ballistic electron transport of ITO/p-Si junction can be ascribed as the formation of interfacial oxide with localized nanoleakage (void channel) path buried inside oxide layer. The channel length of leakage path is well defined by interfacial oxide layer (∼ 3 nm) [1-2][4][13].