Investigation of electrical characteristics of Ag/ZnO/Si sandwich structure

In this study, temperature-dependent current-voltage (I-V), frequency-dependent capacitance-voltage (C-V) and conductance-voltage (G/omega-V) measurements are carried out for the electrical characterization of a zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film-based diode. The sandwich structure in the form of Ag/ZnO/Si/Al is investigated at temperatures between 220 and 360 K and in the frequency region of 1 kHz-1 MHz. ZnO thin film layer is deposited on a p-Si wafer substrate as a transparent conductive oxide layer by taking into consideration possible electronic applications with intrinsic attractive material properties. At each temperature step, the I-V curves showed about two orders of magnitude rectifying behavior and, according to the Schottky diode relation, the saturation current, zero-bias barrier height and ideality factor were extracted as a function of the temperature. In the case of non-ideal diode characteristics due to the inhomogeneties in the diode as observed from the characteristics of the calculated parameters, effective barrier height values are evaluated. In addition, based on the existence of the interface layer, density of interface states in the band gap region and parasitic resistances were determined by the capacitance measurements.