Low-Frequency Contact Noise of GaN Nanowire Device Detected by Cross-Spectrum Technique

We report the properties of low-frequency contact noise of multielectrode GaN nanowire (NW) devices. A two-port cross-spectrum technique is used to discriminate the noise of the ohmic contact from that of the NW section. The diameter of the GaN NW is around 100 nm. The Ti/Al electrodes of the NWs are defined by e-beam lithography. The typical resistance of a NW section with a length of 800nm is about 5.5 k Omega and the two-wire resistance is below 100 k Omega. The results show that the low-frequency excess noise of the GaN NW is much smaller than that of the current-flowing contact, indicating that the contact noise dominates the noise behavior in our GaN NW devices. A careful study of the noise amplitude (A) of the 1/f noise of different types of NW and carbon nanotube devices, both in our work and in the literature, yields an empirical formula for estimating A from the two-wire resistance of the device. (C) 2011 The Japan Society of Applied Physics