Resonant tunneling of holes through silicon barriers

Abstract
We have investigated molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE) grown Si/SiGe hole resonant tunneling devices (RTDs) consisting of an unstrained Si0.5Ge0.5 quantum well between two strained Si barriers. A peak current density of 104 A/cm2 and a peak-to-valley current ratio of 1.5:1 at 77 K and 2:1 at 4 K has been obtained. Using magnetotunneling measurements at 4 K, two resonances, corresponding to tunneling through the heavy hole and light hole states, have been identified with a light hole-to-heavy hole effective mass ratio of 3.2, suggesting that the hole band structure in the Si/Si0.5Ge0.5 double barrier system is silicon-like. We have examined devices with the same quantum well structure, but with different spacer thicknesses (90–360 Å) to study the influence of doping profile on the peak-to-valley current ratio and peak voltage position. Using these measurements, we have extracted the electric field across the quantum well for the different devices. These electric field values suggest that holes are exiting the quantum well at their saturation velocity of ∼107 cm/s.