A comparative electrical transport study on Cu/n-type InP Schottky diode measured at 300 and 100 K

• Electrical properties of Cu/n-InP Schottky contacts with oxygen plasma treatment were investigated.
• The current–voltage (I–V) characteristics were analyzed with considering various transport models.
• Relative high ideality factor for untreated sample was due to the generation-recombination (GR) current.
• The tunneling effect was more significant for the plasma treated sample with low power.

Two oxygen plasma treated InP samples with different plasma powers of 100 and 250 W were prepared and a comparative study on the electrical properties of Cu/n-type InP Schottky diode measured at 300 and 100 K was performed to investigate the current transport mechanism in detail. The forward and reverse bias current–voltage (I–V) characteristics were analyzed with considering various transport models. The fitting to the forward bias I–V characteristics revealed that relatively high ideality factor at 300 K for untreated sample were related with the generation-recombination (GR) current and the large E00 value at 100 K for 100 W plasma treated sample were associated with more significant tunneling effect. The analyses on the reverse bias current characteristics showed the suitable current transport model has changed from thermionic emission (TE) to TE combined with barrier lowering for both untreated and 250 W treated samples and from TE + BL to thermionic field emission for 100 W treated sample with increasing temperature from 100 to 300 K.