Study of the electrical cycling stressed large area Schottky diodes using I–V and noise measurements

Large area commercial Al/n-Si Schottky diodes were subjected to an electrical cycling stress in order to cause degradation of diodes with local contact irregularities. Using the I–V characteristics and noise measurements in the frequency range of 10 Hz to 10 kHz at room temperature and using the corresponding equivalent circuit representation of degraded diodes, it has been shown that the latent leakage paths contribute to the degradation of the Schottky diodes under the test conditions. The results could be used to confirm that the ideality factor cannot be alone used as prediction tool of diode behavior under electrical cycling stress. The conclusion of this paper is that the results show that this kind of the stress test can be used as a screening test for diodes with latent leakage current paths.