Comment on "Empirical fit to band discontinuities and barrier heights in III-V alloy systems"

Abstract

In a recent letter Tiwari and Frank(1) “present a figure summarizing the variation of ... band discontinuity ... and gold Schottky barrier height for binary and ternary III-V semiconductors.” Figures constructed in the same way were presented earlier by McCaldin and co-workers (2-4) for binary compounds, including the III-Vs, and by Schuermeyer et al.(5) for ternary III-Vs. As for the numerical values used in the Tiwari and Frank figure, their energy values for binary III-V compounds are in excellent agreement with values presented(6) in 1976, which they seem to be unaware of. Thus yet undiscussed aspects of their letter are (1) the relevance of a previously described graphical presentation and (2) agreement with sixteen year old data.