A Contacting Technology to Magnetic Semiconductors

The present paper describes the contacting technology to the diluted magnetic semiconductor Cd1-xMnxTe having potential applications in optoelectronic and spintronic devices. For efficient spin injection into a spintronic material, a matching ohmic contact is the demand of the time. Since cadmium telluride has a well-known contact problem, its manganese-doped counterpart is also facing a similar difficulty. In the present case Cd1-xMnxTe was fabricated using thermally assisted interdiffusion and compound formation between repeated stacked elemental layers of manganese, cadmium and tellurium. A wet electroless deposition technique was employed to deposit manganese doped nickel phosphide as a magnetic contact onto Cd1-xMnxTe. It appeared that the contact resistivity improved compared to the case of gold contact. The details of the contacting technology and the results have been described in the text of the paper.