Fabrication and performance of optoelectronic devices with metal/diamond-like carbon Schottky contact

In this paper, we report the successful fabrication of the optoelectronic devices based on diamond-like carbon films deposited by r.f. plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. In the metal–semiconductor–metal structure devices, three kinds of metals Al, Au and Ag are separately deposited on the same DLC films to form metal/DLC contacts. It is confirmed that three metal/DLC contacts are all Schottky contacts by the current–voltage characteristics of devices. Three barrier heights are obtained from theoretic analyses of the I–V characteristics to be 0.74 eV, 0.79 eV and 0.85 eV respectively for Al, Au and Ag. The spectral response of the photodetector is also obtained and the main detecting wavelength region is around 500–600 nm.