Abstract
A qualitative difference between high-voltage gallium-arsenide diodes and similar silicon devices is found experimentally upon ultrafast switching in the delayed avalanche breakdown regime. It is shown that, following switching, a gallium-arsenide diode remains in a highly conductive state throughout the entire duration of the applied voltage pulse and the recovery of the reverse voltage across the p-n junction due to the dispersal of nonequilibrium electron-hole plasma is not observed. In the same interval of time (2 ns in our experiment), a silicon diode passes completely into a blocking state. The residual voltage amplitude for a gallium-arsenide diode is an order of magnitude lower than that for a silicon device. The discovered effect is similar to a known effect of “sticking” of gallium-arsenide diode switches (the lock-on effect), which are triggered by a laser pulse, in a conductive state.
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Original Russian Text © V.I. Brylevskii, A.V. Rozhkov, I.A. Smirnova, P.B. Rodin, I.V. Grekhov, 2015, published in Pis’ma v Zhurnal Tekhnicheskoi Fiziki, 2015, Vol. 41, No. 7, pp. 1–7.
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Brylevskii, V.I., Rozhkov, A.V., Smirnova, I.A. et al. Anomalous dynamics of the residual voltage across a gallium-arsenide diode upon subnanosecond avalanche switching. Tech. Phys. Lett. 41, 307–309 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063785015040045
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063785015040045