Consequences of anion vacancy nearest‐neighbor hopping in III‐V compound semiconductors: Drift in InP metal‐insulator‐semiconductor field‐effect transistors

Diffusion experiments of Zn doped III‐V superlattice structures have given strong evidence that the hopping of anion vacancies to nearest‐neighbor sites, on the cation sublattice, is an important mode of atomic diffusion. A consequence of such hopping is the conversion of a donor state of the anion vacancy to multiple acceptor states of the cation vacancy‐antisite defect complex that results. When a device is switched from depletion to accumulation, such hopping allows the material to adjust its defect distribution to a new equilibrium in the presence of the field. We show that observations of drift in InP metal‐insulator‐semiconductor field effect transistors, MISFETs, are consistent with this origin.