Development and Recent Progress on Diamond Semiconductor Devices

Abstract

Diamond has excellent physical properties as high breakdown electric field, high thermal conductivity, and high bulk carrier mobility. From these points of view, diamond is expected as an appropriate material which can be applied to next-generation high-power devices. However, the impurity levels of p- and n-type diamond are very deep. Therefore, carrier concentration generated by impurities is very low at room temperature. In order to overcome this issue, heavily impurity-doped layers, which shows hopping-conduction, can be applied in diamond devices. In this paper, Schottky-pn diode with extremely high forward current density is introduced as a typical diamond diode using hopping conduction layers. The recent progresses of diamond switching devices, such as MOSFET, are also introduced.