Question

What is the main cause of zener breakdown?

Answer 1

1. Zener breakdown in heavily doped PN junction.
2. Due to the heavy doping, the depletion layer gets extremely thin.
3. The main cause of zener breakdown is high doping concentrations.
4. The breakdown condition occurs when we increase the voltage in small increments and experience a massive current flow in the device.
5. Which results in de-ionization due to the slow acceleration of the carrier.
6. Thus, the current in reverse bias increases only due to reverse breakdown voltage.