Si-based materials and devices for light emission in silicon

✍ Scribed by Maria Eloisa Castagna; Salvatore Coffa; Mariantonietta Monaco; Liliana Caristia; Alberto Messina; Rosario Mangano; Corrado Bongiorno

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 259 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1386-9477
• DOI: 10.1016/s1386-9477(02)00644-6

✦ Synopsis

We report on the fabrication and performances of extremely e cient Si-based light sources. The devices consist of MOS structures with erbium (Er) implanted in the thin gate oxide. The devices exhibit strong 1:54 m electroluminescence (EL) at 300 K with a 10% external quantum e ciency, comparable to that of standard light-emitting diodes using III-V semiconductors. Er excitation is caused by hot electrons impact and oxide wearout limits the reliability of the devices. Much more stable light-emitting MOS devices have been fabricated using Er-doped silicon rich oxide (SRO) ÿlms as gate dielectric. These devices show a high stability, with an external quantum e ciency reduced to 1%. In these devices, Er pumping occurs by energy transfer from the Si nanostructures to the rare-earth ions. Finally, we have also fabricated MOS structures with Tb-and Yb-doped SiO2 which show room temperature EL at 540 nm (Tb) and 980 nm (Yb) with an external quantum e ciency of a 10% and 0.1%, respectively.