Electrical and photoelectrical characterization of Au/n-Si diode with sputtered ZrO2 interlayer

ZrO2 thin films were deposited on n-Si and quartz substrates by a reactive sputtering technique. The morphological and optical characterization of a sputtered ZrO2 thin film revealed a highly smooth surface with 1.5 nm roughness and optical band gap value of 5.7 eV. An Au/ZrO2/n-Si metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structure was obtained by evaporation of the Au on ZrO2/n-Si structure. The electrical properties analyzed by current-voltage (I-V) measurements in the dark showed that the device had 5. 094 ideality factor, 0.808 eV barrier height, and 50 ? series resistance values. The C-V measurements showed that the device could not follow the AC signals at higher frequencies owing to the interface states, and the barrier height value calculated using C-V data (0.916 eV) is higher than the one obtained from the I-V plot. The photoelectrical parameters were determined by I-V measurements at various light intensities. The findings proved that the photoelectrical parameters of the MIS device had a photosensing behavior.