Some semiconductor photonic devices show large discontinuities in the band structure. Short tunnel paths caused by this band structure may lead to an excessive tunneling current, especially in highly doped layers. Modelling of this tunnelling current is therefore important when designing photonic devices with such band structures. The traditional Kane’s tunnelling model can only be applied to homostructures. An extension to heterostructures is developed to study interband tunneling probability in InP-based heterostructures and the resulting tunnelling current is calculated
