Evidence for excess carrier storage in electron-hole plasma in silicon transistors

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Abstract
This work presents experimental evidence for significantly greater charge storage in highly excited silicon near room temperature than conventional theory would predict. The experiments used low-doped collector regions of silicon bipolar transistors subjected to strong electrical excitations yielding an electron-hole (e-h) plasma having electron-hole pair densities up to about 4 × 1018cm-3. As a possible interpretation, we connect these findings to a significant bandgap narrowing Δ EG(≃80 meV at 4 × 1018cm-3). These data are compared with various data for Δ EG, in heavily doped silicon. Important device implications are discussed for integrated-circuit and discrete bipolar transistors and for photoconductivity switches.