High-Amplitude and High-Frequency Oscillations of Temperature, Electron-Hole pair concentration, and Current in SOI Structures

Interacting oscillations of the current, lattice temperature, and concentration of thermally generated electron–hole pairs were discovered in silicon films of silicon-on-insulator structures upon their heating with extremely high current. The nature of the oscillations discovered is fundamentally different from what has yet been known. They occur owing to two competing processes: the thermal generation of electron–hole pairs, and the pair concentration reduction caused by the current flowing through the silicon film with nonuniform temperature field. In our experiments the current density reached 1.5x10^5 A/cm2 and the specific power dissipated in the silicon film exceeded 3.6 GW/cm3.We observed the oscillation frequencies up to 3 MHz and variations of the current and pair concentration were more than tenfold, while the temperature varied from 700–740 to 950–1300 K.