March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
26h 33m
English
Many of the useful properties of a p-n junction can be achieved by simply forming an appropriate metal–semiconductor contact. This approach is obviously attractive because of its simplicity of fabrication; also, as we shall see in this section, metal–semiconductor junctions are particularly useful when high-speed rectification is required. On the other hand, we also must be able to form nonrectifying (ohmic) contacts to semiconductors. Therefore, this section deals with both rectifying and ohmic contacts.
In Section 2.2.1 we discussed the work function qΦm of a metal in a vacuum. An energy of qΦm is required to remove an electron at the Fermi level to the vacuum outside the metal. Typical ...