It is shown that peripheral current Ip flows in non‐self‐aligned mesa‐type p–n diodes but that Ip flowing in GaN diodes cannot be explained by elongated minority‐carrier lifetime associated with intrinsic photon recycling (IPR), i.e., reabsorption of radiative recombination. Accordingly, possible increase in the ratio of deep Mg acceptors (energy level: EA) due to extrinsic photon recycling (EPR) is proposed, and the effect of EPR is expressed as an effective EA. Due to the limit on the power dissipation of a semiconductor package, EPR works effectively in the case of zero‐offset bipolar‐junction transistors, whose base doping level is limited in terms of emitter‐injection efficiency.
Measured and simulated forward‐current–voltage characteristics of non‐self‐aligned mesa‐type GaN p–n diodes.