Universality of Zener tunneling in homojunction p-ⁿ diodes

We show that in homojunction p-n diodes made of semiconductors with unequal electron and hole effective masses, Zener tunneling is approximately universal, but not perfectly universal, as a function of effective tunneling width, where the effective tunneling width takes the effects of band curvature into account. We find that the curvature correction (CC), which is applied to obtain the approximate universality of tunneling, is by itself not universal but show that (1-CC) / N2 is universal as a function of the tunneling width for a given material, where N is the doping density. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.