TABLE OF CONTENTS R.K. Ahrenkiel
June 1998
This chapter will detail the electrical transport properties of InP that are described in the literature. These properties include majority-carrier mobility as a function of carrier concentration and temperature. Closely associated with the latter topic are the bulk resistivities as a function of carrier concentration and temperature. These properties are then examined as a function of growth conditions including bulk wafer and the various types of epitaxial growth. The remainder of the chapter discusses minority-carrier properties beginning with the minority-carrier lifetime. Closely associated with the lifetime is the diffusion length for minority carriers. A topic associated with minority-carrier lifetime, the surface recombination velocity, concludes the chapter.
There is scant information on another topic, the minority carrier mobility and diffusivity, because measurement of these quantities is quite complex. By contrast, the majority-carrier mobility is routinely measured by the variation of the Hall effect, which is called the van der Pauw technique [1]. The most common technique for estimating the minority-carrier mobility, ?, is to extrapolate from majority-carrier data using a common ionised impurity concentration and temperature. The diffusivity, D, is related to the minority carrier mobility for non-degenerate semiconductors by means of the Einstein relationship
| (1) |  |
Here, k is the Boltzmann constant, T is the absolute temperature and q is the electronic charge. At room temperature, kT/q is about 0.026 eV.
The chapter is constructed from relevant sections of the 1991 edition of Properties of Indium Phosphide [2]...
