Excess Noise in High-Current Diamond Diodes -- Physical Mechanisms and Implications for Reliability Assessment

TL;DR

This study investigates low-frequency excess noise in high-current diamond diodes, revealing generation-recombination noise dominance, distinctive spectral features, and temperature-dependent performance, which are crucial for reliability assessment in high-power applications.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the physical mechanisms of excess noise in diamond diodes and demonstrates their implications for device reliability evaluation.

Findings

Noise dominated by generation-recombination processes

Spectral features include Lorentzian and 1/f noise

Device performance improves with temperature

Abstract

We report results of an investigation of low-frequency excess noise in high-current diamond diodes. It was found that the electronic excess noise of the diamond diodes is dominated by generation - recombination noise, which reveals itself either as Lorentzian spectral features or as a 1/f noise spectrum (f is the frequency). The generation - recombination bulges are characteristic for diamond diodes with lower turn-on voltages. The noise spectral density dependence on forward current, I, reveals three distinctive regions in all examined devices - it scales as I^2 at the low (I<10 uA) and high (I>10 mA) currents, and, rather unusually, remain nearly constant at the intermediate current range. The characteristic trap time constants, extracted from the noise data, reveal a uniquely strong dependence on current. Interestingly, the performance of the diamond diodes improves with increasing temperature. The obtained results are important for development of noise spectroscopy-based approaches for device reliability assessment for the high-power diamond electronics.