Abstract
The roles played by band structure, ionicity, and phonon energies in the transferred-electron (TE) effect in III-V compound semiconductors at 300 K are analyzed within a simple transport model. Expressions are obtained for the threshold field, the peak velocity, the frequency limit, the valley velocity, the breakdown field, and the relative noise level. These exhibit a powerful dependence on the magnitudes of relevant phonon energies and also on ionicity. The dependence on individual band structures is relatively weak. A figure of merit for TE materials is suggested, on which basis InP emerges as over three times better than GaAs.