Reverse Recovery and Decay of Stored Excess Carriers in a-SI:HP-I-N Diode

Abstract

ABSTRACTCarrier transport properties, including mobility and carrier lifetimes, or the mobility-lifetime-product, are important parameters for the understanding of the electronic properties of amorphous silicon devices. We have attempted to study these parameters by the junction recovery method which is useful in crystal p-i-n devices, and by the decay of the forward and reverse bias current with varying periods of zero bias delays after removal of the forward bias. We found that the current decay by the standard reverse bias recovery is much faster than that due to the decay under zero bias. In this paper we present our experimental results. We conclude that the true decay of the stored charged due to forward bias is much longer and consequently, the stored charge is much larger than that suggested by standard reverse recovery experiments.