Experimental evidence of electron multiplication, extracted from double heterojunction bipolar transistors, reveals a suppressed electron impact ionization coefficient, , with weak temperature dependence in compared to those measured from binary and , which could not be predicted by the widely used Okuto–Crowell relation assuming that the optical phonon scattering is the only dominant scattering process during impact ionization. We show that discrepancies between the experimental data and the Okuto–Crowell relation can be consistently ascribed to the involvement of alloy scattering. This provides an improved insight into understanding the presence of alloy scattering on carrier impact ionization behavior in .
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