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The saturation current (or scale current), more accurately the reverse saturation current, is the part of the reverse current in a semiconductor diode caused by diffusion of minority carriers from the neutral regions to the depletion region. This current is almost independent of the reverse voltage.
When no current is observed through the tube, the negative voltage has reached the value that is high enough to slow down and stop the most energetic photoelectrons of kinetic energy K max. This value of the retarding voltage is called the stopping potential or cut off potential V o . [ 11 ]
The highest (maximum) value of the photo-current is called saturation current. The value of retarding potential at which photo-current becomes zero is called cut-off voltage or stopping potential for the given frequency of the incident ray.
The effect of reverse saturation current on the I-V curve of a crystalline silicon solar cell are shown in the figure to the right. Physically, reverse saturation current is a measure of the "leakage" of carriers across the p–n junction in reverse bias.
The bias voltage is chosen to be a few times the electron temperature so that the negative electrode draws the ion saturation current, which, like the floating potential, is directly measured. A common rule of thumb for this voltage bias is 3/e times the expected electron temperature.
The dark current includes photocurrent generated by background radiation and the saturation current of the semiconductor junction. Dark current must be accounted for by calibration if a photodiode is used to make an accurate optical power measurement, and it is also a source of noise when a photodiode is used in an optical communication system.
The Shockley diode equation relates the diode current of a p-n junction diode to the diode voltage .This relationship is the diode I-V characteristic: = (), where is the saturation current or scale current of the diode (the magnitude of the current that flows for negative in excess of a few , typically 10 −12 A).
Shockley derives an equation for the voltage across a p-n junction in a long article published in 1949. [2] Later he gives a corresponding equation for current as a function of voltage under additional assumptions, which is the equation we call the Shockley ideal diode equation. [3]