EFFECT OF INTERFACE ROUGHNESS ON THE CURRENT-VOLTAGE CHARACTERISTIC OF A RESONANT TUNNELING DIODE

A double-barrier resonant tunneling diode with interface roughness is represented by a number of ideal diodes, with planar interfaces but differing geometries, connected in parallel. The current-voltage characteristic of the real diode is then given by the weighted average of the ideal diode characteristics, where the weight attributed to any given geometry is determined by its probability of occurrence in the real structure. We find, assuming coherent transport, that interface roughness has only small effects on the current-voltage characteristics of these systems when the electron's coherence length is much smaller than the lateral scale of interface roughness. © 1992.