The asymmetry doping problem has severely hindered the potential applications of many wideband gap (WBG) materials. Here, we propose a possible approach to overcome this long-standing doping asymmetry problem for WBG semiconductors. Our approach is based on the reduction of the ionization energies of dopants through introduction and effective doping of mutually passivated impurity bands, which can be realized by doping the host with passive donor-acceptor complexes or isovalent impurities. Our density-functional theory calculations demonstrate that this approach provides excellent explanations for the $n$-type doping of diamond and $p$-type doping of ZnO, which could not be understood by previous theories. In principle, this approach can be applied to any WBG semiconductors and therefore will open a broad vista for the application of WBG materials.

• Received 13 November 2006

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.135506