Carrier transport mechanisms in semiconductor nanostructures and devices

Semiconductor nanostructures have gained importance due to their potential application in future nanoelectronic devices. For such applications, it is extremely important to understand the electrical properties of semiconductor nanostructures. This review presents an overview of techniques to measure the electrical properties of individual and clusters of semiconductor nanostructures using microcopy based techniques or by fabricating metallic electrical contacts using lithography. Then it is shown that current-voltage (I-V) characteristics can be used to determine the conduction mechanism in these nanostructures. It has been explained that various material parameters can be extracted from I-V characteristics. The frequently observed conduction mechanism in these nanostructures such as thermally activated conduction, space charge limited current (SCLC), hopping conduction, Poole Frenkel conduction, Schottky emission and Fowler Nordheim (FN) tunneling are explained in detail.