Quantitative Analysis of Current–Voltage Characteristics of Semiconducting Nanowires: Decoupling of Contact Effects

Abstract

Abstract A metal‐semiconductor‐metal (M‐S‐M) model for quantitative analysis of current–voltage ( I–V ) characteristics of semiconducting nanowires is described and applied to fit experimental I–V curves of Bi 2 S 3 nanowire transistors. The I–V characteristics of semiconducting nanowires are found to depend sensitively on the contacts, in particular on the Schottky barrier height and contact area, and the M‐S‐M model is shown to be able to reproduce all experimentally observed I–V characteristics using only few fitting variables. A procedure for decoupling contact effects from that of the intrinsic parameters of the semiconducting nanowires, such as conductivity, carrier mobility and doping concentration is proposed, demonstrated using experimental I–V curves obtained from Bi 2 S 3 nanowires and compared with the field‐effect based method.