Effects of chemical treatment on barrier height and ideality factors of Au/GaN Schottky diodes

We have studied Au/n-GaN Schottky barrier diodes. GaN surfaces have been prepared by cleaning in HCl and (NH4)2S prior to metal deposition. The zero-biased barrier heights and ideality factors obtained from the current–voltage characteristics differ from diode to diode, although all the samples were prepared identically. The statistical analysis for the reverse bias C–V data yielded mean value of (1.35±0.04) eV for Schottky barrier height of HCl treated sample and (1.20±0.03) eV for (NH4)2S sample, where 9 dots were considered from each cleaning method. It was found that the barrier height values obtained from the C−2–V (1.43 eV) and I–V characteristics (0.89 eV) are different from each other by 0.54 eV. The inhomogeneous barrier heights were found to be related to the effect of the high series resistance on diode parameters (Akkiliç et al., 2004) [1].