Electrical characteristics of Si/ZnO core-shell nanowire heterojunction diode

Abstract

In this paper, we have presented the electrical characteristics of the silicon nanowire (SiNW)/ Zinc oxide (ZnO) core-shell heterojunction diode. In this work ZnO thin film was conformally deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD) method on vertically-aligned SiNW arrays, fabricated by electroless metal deposition and etching method with the help of ultrasonication. The current-voltage and capacitance-voltage characteristics were measured to show the electronic properties of the device. The current-voltage characteristics show the nonlinear rectifying nature of the SiNW/ZnO core-shell heterojunction diode with ideality factor and barrier height of 3.2 and 0.68 eV respectively. The barrier height measured from C-V characteristics is 0.97 V. The difference between barrier heights calculated from both I-V and C-V characteristics show that barrier inhomogeneities can be present between the interface of Si and ZnO. However, the satisfactory performance of junction characteristics ideality factor and turn-on voltage of the Si/ZnO core-shell heterojunction diodes indicates their potential applications in optoelectronics and photonics. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.