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Diusion capacitance

1 References notes

Diusion Capacitance is the capacitance due to transport of charge carriers between two terminals of a device, for example, the diusion of carriers from anode to
cathode in forward bias mode of a diode or from emitter to baseforward-biased junction for a transistor. In a
semiconductor device with a current owing through it
(for example, an ongoing transport of charge by diusion)
at a particular moment there is necessarily some charge
in the process of transit through the device. If the applied voltage changes to a dierent value and the current
changes to a dierent value, a dierent amount of charge
will be in transit in the new circumstances. The change
in the amount of transiting charge divided by the change
in the voltage causing it is the diusion capacitance. The
adjective diusion is used because the original use of
this term was for junction diodes, where the charge transport was via the diusion mechanism. See Ficks laws of
diusion.

[1] William Liu (2001). MOSFET Models for Spice Simulation. New York: Wiley-Interscience. pp. 4244. ISBN
0-471-39697-4.
[2] Hailing Wang, Ten-Lon Chen, and Gennady Gildenblat,
Quasi-static and Nonquasi-static Compact MOSFET Models http://pspmodel.asu.edu/downloads/ted03.pdf

2 External links
Junction capacitance

To implement this notion quantitatively, at a particular


moment in time let the voltage across the device be V
. Now assume that the voltage changes with time slowly
enough that at each moment the current is the same as the
DC current that would ow at that voltage, say I = I(V )
(the quasistatic approximation). Suppose further that the
time to cross the device is the forward transit time F
. In this case the amount of charge in transit through the
device at this particular moment, denoted Q , is given by

Q = I(V )F
Consequently, the corresponding diusion capacitance:
Cdif f . is

Cdif f =

dQ
dV

dI(V )
F
dV

In the event the quasi-static approximation does not hold,


that is, for very fast voltage changes occurring in times
shorter than the transit time F , the equations governing time-dependent transport in the device must be solved
to nd the charge in transit, for example the Boltzmann
equation. That problem is a subject of continuing research under the topic of non-quasistatic eects. See Liu
,[1] and Gildenblat et al.[2]
1

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Diusion capacitance Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion%20capacitance?oldid=602138900 Contributors: Samw, Charles


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