Performance improvement of large area GaN MSM photodiode with thin AlGaN surface layer

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a new structure of GaN based metal‐semiconductor‐metal (MSM) photodiode, in which a thin unintentionally doped n‐type AlGaN layer is added on the conventional GaN on Si(111) device structure.Design/methodology/approachA thin Al0.50Ga0.50N cap layer of 100 nm was incorporated in GaN MSM photodiode to enhance the effective Schottky barrier height and reduce the dark current. When the incident light with photon energy higher than the band edge of GaN but lower than the bandgap of AlGaN illuminates the front face of photodiode, the light can be transparent in the top AlGaN layer and is only absorbed by the GaN layer. As a result, the photogenerated carriers in the GaN layer would be influenced by the interface states of AlGaN/GaN. It is known that the density of the interface states is normally lower than that of surface states, so the recombination of photogenerated electron‐hole pairs will be reduced. A barrier height of 0.54 eV for normal GaN MSM photodiode was increased to the effective barrier height of 0.60 eV.FindingsThe resulting MSM photodiode shows a dark current of as low as 8.0×10−4 A at 5 V bias, which is about two orders of magnitude lower than that of normal GaN (1.0×10−2 A at 5 V bias) MSM photodiode.Originality/valueThe paper reports on barrier enhanced GaN Schottky MSM photodiode using a thin AlGaN cap layer. AlGaN cap layers were found to effectively suppress the leakage current of the GaN Schottky MSM photodiode, resulting in improved device characteristics. The dark current for the Schottky contact with the AlGaN cap layer was shown to be about about two orders of magnitude smaller than that of conventional GaN Schottky MSM photodiode.