A computerized method for carrier lifetime measurement in PN junctions at high and low-level injection

A system to determine the minority carrier lifetime in PN semiconductor junctions in the range of 50 ns to 100 μs has been developed. The measurement is performed by using the Open Circuit Voltage Decay (OCVD) technique. The equipment consists mainly of a data acquisition system based on a PIC16F877A microcontroller, connected to a computer, and software for the control of the entire system, data processing, storage and visualization of results.