Diamond Electronic Devices

For high‐power and high‐voltage applications, silicon is by far the dominant semiconductor material. However, silicon has many limitations, e.g. a relatively low thermal conductivity, electric breakdown occurs at relatively low fields and the bandgap is 1.1 eV which effectively limits operation to temperatures below 175° C. Wide‐bandgap materials, such as silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and diamond offer the potential to overcome both the temperature and power handling limitations of silicon. Diamond is the most extreme in this class of materials. By the fundamental material properties alone, diamond offers the largest benefits as a semiconductor material for power electronic applications. On the other hand, diamond has a problem with a large carrier activation energy of available dopants which necessitates specialised device concepts to allow room temperature (RT) operation. In addition, the role of common defects on the charge transport properties of diamond is poorly understood. Notwithstanding this, many proof‐of‐principle two‐terminal and three‐terminal devices have been made and tested. Two‐terminal electronic diamond devices described in the literature include: p‐n diodes, p‐i‐n diodes, various types of radiation detectors, Schottky diodes and photoconductive or electron beam triggered switches. Three terminal devices include e.g. MISFETs and JFETs. However, the development of diamond devices poses great challenges for the future. A particularly interesting way to overcome the doping problem, for which there has been some recent progress, is to make so‐called delta doped (or pulse‐doped) devices. Such devices utilise very thin (∼1 nm) doped layers in order to achieve high RT activation.