Insights into the performance of InAs-based devices in extreme environments from multiscale simulations

Developing electronic devices for space exploration requires understanding the response of the individual components to harsh environments including extreme temperatures and ionizing radiation. In this work, InAs-based devices were studied using multiscale computations. It was found that arsenide vacancies and arsenide anti-sites were the most energetically favorable point defects to form under indium-rich and indium-poor conditions, respectively, with the arsenide anti-site reducing the electron mobility by a factor of 10 at 300 K. Both defect types were found to introduce relatively deep charge transition levels in the band gap and mediate n-type conduction with ionization energies of 0.26 eV and 0.31 eV, respectively. Under indium-rich conditions, indium substitutional defects had comparable stability to the arsenide vacancies and introduced a shallow donor level with ionization energy of 0.03 eV and may play a role in n-type behavior in response to radiation damage. Indium vacancies were significantly less stable than other defects under all conditions and were the only defects to mediate p-type conduction by introducing shallow levels in the band gap. The Seebeck coefficient was found to increase monotonically from -5 × 10 –4 V/K toward zero as the concentration of n-type dopants increased from 10 15 to 10 21 cm −3 . The electrical conductivity was shown to increase dramatically by several orders of magnitude around doping concentration of 10 20 cm −3 for both donors and acceptors. Finally, I – V characteristic curves showed dramatic increase of current in response to increase in temperature and radiation dose consistent with the available literature.