Reproducibility in the negative differential resistance characteristic of In0.17Al0.83N/GaN resonant tunneling diodes-Theoretical investigation

We report on a simulation of gallium nitride (GaN) based resonant tunneling diode (RTD) at the Silvaco's ATLAS simulation platform with indium aluminum nitride (InAlN) as barrier layer. Results show that an excellent reproducibility of negative-differential-resistance (NDR) characteristic can be achieved when experimentally obtained deep-level trapping centers at the activation energy of 0.351 and 0.487 eV, respectively, are introduced into the polarized InAlN/GaN/InAlN quantum well. Theoretical analysis reveals that the lattice-matched InAlN/GaN heterostructure with stronger spontaneous polarization and weaker piezoelectric polarization can reduce the activation energy level of trapping centers, suppress the probability of ionization of the trapping centers, and therefore minimize the degradation of NDR characteristics, which demonstrates a potential application of the GaN-based RTD in terahertz regime. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.