Improved high resistivity ZnS films on HgCdTe for passivation of infrared devices

We report the results of DC current–voltage characteristics, resistivity and conduction mechanism of 2500 Å thick ZnS films deposited by e-beam evaporation technique for applications of surface passivation in HgCdTe based devices. The typical near zero bias leakage currents were very low and varying from 37 fA to 1.1 pA corresponding to a resistivity variation of 2.2 × 1012 to 1.0 × 1013 ohm cm for the well behaved devices. The films showed typically leakage current densities of under 3 × 10−9 A/cm2 near zero bias. These observations were further analyzed for conduction mechanism results prevailing in our films. As regards current transport, these films showed trends of Ohmic conduction in low electric field strengths, combination of Ohmic conduction and Frenkel–Poole (FP) for medium field strengths and FP conduction for high electric field strengths. All the experimental observations could be fitted very well using the said conduction mechanisms. We have shown that ZnS can continue to be used as passivant for modern high density area arrays based on HgCdTe and in order to further improve the performance of this passivant, one has to reduce FP conduction at high fields of greater than 0.25 MV/cm.