Demonstration of resonant tunneling effects in metal-double-insulator-metal (MI2M) diodes

Abstract

Although the effect of resonant tunneling in metal-double-insulator-metal (MI2M) diodes has been predicted for over two decades, no experimental demonstrations have been reported at the low voltages needed for energy harvesting rectenna applications. Using quantum-well engineering, we demonstrate the effects of resonant tunneling in a Ni/NiO/Al2O3/Cr/Au MI2M structures and achieve the usually mutually exclusive desired characteristics of low resistance ($${R}_{0}^{DC} \sim$$ R 0 D C ~ 13 kΩ for 0.035 μm2) and high responsivity (β0 = 0.5 A W−1) simultaneously. By varying the thickness of insulators to modify the depth and width of the MI2M quantum well, we show that resonant quasi-bound states can be reached at near zero-bias, where diodes self-bias when driven by antennas illuminated at 30 THz. We present an improvement in energy conversion efficiency by more than a factor of 100 over the current state-of-the-art, offering the possibility of engineering efficient energy harvesting rectennas.

Oxides for Rectenna Technology

“…Full details of rectification parameters, area and deposition technique for MI n M diodes are listed in Table 3 for completeness. It can be seen that one of the MIM oxide contenders, Al 2 O 3 , has been explored in combination with lower band gap oxides, such as HfO 2 [18,58], Ta 2 O 5 [30,51,96], Nb 2 O 5 [17,51], and most recently NiO [45,97]. Furthermore, NiO has been used in combination with TiO 2 [14], Nb 2 O 5 [98] and ZnO [80].…”

“…Another recent breakthrough is that resonant quasi-bound states can be reached at near 0 V, where Ni/NiO/AlO x /CrAu diodes self-bias when illuminated at 30 THz by the antenna part. By modifying the depth and width of the quantum well (Figure 5a) of a 0.035 µm 2 diode by changing insulator thicknesses, low R 0 = 13 kΩ and high β 0 = 0.5 A/W were achieved simultaneously [97]. The resulting bowtie rectenna for diodes where RT has occurred shows improved power conversion efficiency of 1.7 × 10 −8 % [97].…”

“…By modifying the depth and width of the quantum well (Figure 5a) of a 0.035 µm 2 diode by changing insulator thicknesses, low R 0 = 13 kΩ and high β 0 = 0.5 A/W were achieved simultaneously [97]. The resulting bowtie rectenna for diodes where RT has occurred shows improved power conversion efficiency of 1.7 × 10 −8 % [97]. The calculated coupling efficiency for this rectenna is found to be 5.1%, the highest achieved to date.…”

“…The constraint of only growing a derivative oxide layer of the underlying polycrystalline metal can be resolved by directly depositing an insulator on the bottom metal electrode using different deposition techniques and thus facilitating the use of any type of bottom metal electrode irrespective of its native oxide formation properties. These deposition techniques include sputtering [14,17,20,27,28,45,51,59,74,80,83,90,97,98], electron beam evaporation [88] and atomic layer deposition [8,9,18,30,51,56,58,75,81,89,96,[99][100][101], as listed in Tables 2 and 3. Among these techniques, ALD offers the best quality oxides with low defect density, excellent conformality and uniformity.…”

Tunneling Quantum Dynamics in Ammonia

“…As new technology equips quantum devices with more potential advanced usages and applications [1][2][3][4], the current knowledge has reached its limitation. More studies have begun to extend this limitation to the edge of the microscopic world [5][6][7][8]. To seek the underlying physics and mechanism of tunneling, various approaches have been studied [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”