Tunnel charge transport within silicon in reversely-biased MOS tunnel structures

The features of the electrical behaviour of a MOS tunnel structure, which arise from the tunnel carrier transport in semiconductor, are considered. For the explicitely given band diagram, the total current increases due to the contribution of electrons in energy range where the only-oxide tunneling is impossible. The resonance transport via the discrete levels in the quantum well may introduce steps in the reverse current–voltage characteristic. The band-to-band tunneling, which is to be treated as semiconductor tunneling, perturbates the balance of minority carriers in the inversion layer, modifying the charge state of a MOS structure. The stationary non-equilibrium support of a large surface carrier concentration becomes therefore possible, and the voltage partitioning in the MOS structure is distorted.