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9
Gallium Nitride-Based
Interband Tunnel
Junctions
Siddharth Rajan, SriramKrishnamoorthy,
and Fatih Akyol
9.1 INTRODUCTION
Efcient interband tunneling offers interesting opportunities in a wide bandgap
material system such as gallium nitride. An efcient tunnel junction (TJ) can act as a
carrier conversion center, converting electrons into holes and vice versa. In a reverse
biased TJ, electrons in the valence band of the p-type material can tunnel into empty
states in the conduction band, leaving behind a hole in the p-type material. In a forward
biased TJ, electrons in the conduction band tunnel into the empty states available in
the valence ...