Schottky barrier heights, study

Schottky barrier height modulation and stabilization as a "by product" of the original studies. Moreover, since these results are thought to follow from replacement reactions in the vicinity of the interface, they reflect the importance of surface structure as well as composition at semiconductor interfaces. 

Heteroepitaxial growth leads to buried interfaces with very important structural properties that determine, e.g., the Schottky barrier heights in the case of metal-semiconductor junctions. With the improved depth resolutions of the detection systems, structural studies by ion scattering of such interfaces are becoming increasingly feasible. 

The application we have in mind for the metal-polymer interfaces discussed in this book is primarily that where the polymer serves as the electroactive material (semiconductor) in an electronic device and the metal is the electric contact to the device. Metal-semiconductor interfaces, in general, have been the subject of intensive studies since the pioneering work of Schottky, Stromer and Waibel1, who were the first to explain the mechanisms behind the rectifying behaviour in this type of asymmetric electric contact. Today, there still occur developments in the understanding of the basic physics of the barrier formation at the interface, and a complete understanding of all the factors that determine the height of the (Schottky) barrier is still ahead of us2. 

In view of the above, conductivity measurements were conducted in asymmetric systems Au-polymer-Si for polystyrene and polysilazane, and Au-polymer-In for polysiloxane. The difference in barrier height between Au-polymer and Si-polymer estimated on the basis of measurements of the Au-Si barrier is ca. 0.5 eV (M) which, in the case of the conductivity limited by the electrodes, should produce a difference in the intensity of the currents of opposite polarizations equal to about 8 orders of magnitude. The difference in work function of Au and In, on the other hand, is ca. 1 eV so, on the assumption of the Schottky mechanism of conductivity, the difference in the intensity of opposite polarizations should amount to 17 orders of magnitude ( ). As can be seen in Fig. 4 in the case of an asymmetric polysilazane sample there is a difference in the intensity of the currents although this difference does take the expected course, it is several times smaller than expected, and is thus virtually negligible. A similar result was obtained for the polystyrene sample, while in the case of the asymmetric system based on polysiloxane there was no difference in the intensity of the opposite-biassed fields over the entire range of fields used - up to 3 x 10 V/m. It can thus be assumed that the conductivity in the films under study is dominated by the Poole-Frenkel volume generation independent of the contact effects. Such were also the conclusions of the workers who studied the conductivity in polystyrene (29) and polysiloxane (21). 

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