Visible Light Emission by a Reverse-Biased Integrated Silicon Diode

In this paper, the paper discussed the emission of visible light by a monolithically integrated silicon diode under reverse bias. The emission of light is achieved using a special defect-engineered buried layer. The light is emitted as punctiform sources by the defects located at the p-n junction of the reverse-biased diode. The influence of the defects on the electrical behavior is manifested as a current-dependent electroluminescence

I. Introduction

Silicon (si) is the material of choice in contemporary microelectronics. Due to the large increase of cut-off frequencies of devices, e.g., Si heterojunction bipolar transistor from 100 GHz in 1993 [1], over 200 GHz in 2000 [2], to over 300 GHz this year [3], the operating frequency of circuits is increased too. To avoid the negative effects of long electrical transmission lines, optical signal transition for board-to-board, chip-to-chip, and intrachip is proposed [4], [5]. Therefore, the interest in optical emission from the integrated Si devices is growing with the main emphasis on infrared emission from forward-biased light-emitting diodes (LED). We will focus here on the visible light emission from the reverse-biased junctions.