Current Transient Spectroscopic Study of Vacancy Complexes in Diamond Schottky p-i-n Diode

— The present state-of-the-art of junction-based diamond electronic devices is limited by the challenges inherent to the synthesis of n-type layers, where the dopant itself forms defect complexes that are donor compensating centers. Recently, the fabrication of diamond Schottky p-i-n diodes (SPINDs) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of intrinsic diamond films followed by an n-type layer on p-type diamond substrates has been reported to demonstrate excellent diode-like behavior with high rectification factors and surface barrier height at elevated temperatures. However, due to the ultrawide bandgap of diamond and small contact area of the devices, it is challenging to characterize the defect centers that limit the performance of the SPINDs using conventional capacitance transient spectroscopy. In this article, we report the characterization of defect centers in the diamond SPINDs with a contact area of 280 μm × 280 μm using current transient spectroscopy (CTS), which measures thermally induced emission rates from trap centers through change in device current instead of junction capacitance. The CTS scans in the temperature range 80–800 K revealed the presence of five trap-related peaks. Results from density functional theory (DFT) calculations were used to identify the nature of the traps. While most of the detected traps were identified to be vacancy complexes coupled to phosphorus and hydrogen impurities, one trap has been identified as single carbon vacancy. Most of the phosphorus-related defect complexes were observed to be in neutral and/or negative charge states and were identified as acceptor-like states.