Numerical Simulation and Parameter Extraction of Pure Thermionic Emission Across Schottky Contacts

We examine two widely prevalent parameter extraction methodologies for Schottky contacts, namely, Regional and Cheung-Cheung's methods. We establish that the Cheung-Cheung's method is highly effective for barrier heights greater than 0.4 V, but fails for low barrier heights. Further, we examine the thermionic emission (TE) models employed by ATLAS and SENTAURUS simulators. We show that the default TE model in ATLAS, called THERM, is not the right choice but the surface recombination velocity-based models are to be used. The Cheung-Cheung's method, when applied to the simulated data for Schottky contacts on Si and GaN, extracts much different barrier height and ideality factor when the input barrier height is small and series resistance is large.