Giant peak to valley ratio in a GaN based resonant tunnel diode with barrier width modulation

•A III-nitride based bidirectional resonant tunnel diode heterostructure is theoretically proposed.•A peak to valley current ratio as high as 60 is obtained by using the concept of barrier width modulation.•The valley current density is very less (3 mA/cm2) and the current decreases monotonically after the valley point.•This design is particularly favorable for III-nitride based devices as it is based on polarization field engineering.

A barrier width modulated GaN based resonant tunnel diode is theoretically proposed which exhibits a giant peak to valley current ratio as high as 60 and a high negative differential conductance (NDC) of 1.77 × 106 S/cm2 with very low valley current density of 3 mA/cm2. This is achieved by the unique characteristic of the device current which monotonically decreases for applied voltages greater than the valley voltage in our simulation window. This is in contrast to all the other negative differential conductance based devices which experience an immediate exponential increase in current after the NDC region. The proposed device is also the first bidirectional tunneling diode which shows negative differential conductance for both polarity of the applied bias which is normally not observed with the conventional GaN/AlGaN double barrier structures due to the strong asymmetry arising from the internal electric fields due to polarization. The unique characteristics of the device can be attributed to the use of a modulated barrier width which is made possible by a polarization modulating InGaN layer and efficient utilization of internal electric fields in III-nitrides.