Practical silicon Light emitting devices fabricated by standard IC technology

Full Text:Research activities are described with regard to the development of a comprehensive approach for the practical realization of single crystal Silicon Light Emitting Devices (Si-LEDs). Several interesting suggestions for the fabrication of such devices were made in the literature but they were not adopted by the semiconductor industry because they involve non-standard fabrication schemes, requiring special production lines. Our work presents an alternative approach, proposed and realized in practice by us, permitting the fabrication of Si-LEDs using the standard conventional fully industrialized IC technology ''as is'' without any adaptation. It enables their fabrication in the same production lines of the presently existing IC industry. This means that Si-LEDs can now be fabricated simultaneously with other components, such as transistors, on the same silicon chip, using the same masks and processing procedures. The result is that the yield, reliability, and price of the above Si-LEDs are the same as the other Si devices integrated on the same chip. In this work some structural details of several practical Si-LED's designed by us, as well as experimental results describing their performance are presented. These Si-LED's were fabricated to our specifications utilizing standard CMOS/BiCMOS technology, a fact which comprises an achievement by itself. The structure of the Si-LED's, is designed according to specifications such as the required operating voltage, overall light output intensity, its dependence(linear, or non-linear) on the input signal (voltage or current), light generations location (bulk, or near-surface), the emission pattern and uniformity. Such structural design present a problem since the designer can not use any structural parameters (such as doping levels and junction depths for example) but only those which already exist in the production lines. Since the fabrication procedures in these lines are originally designed for processing of other devices and circuits (MOS structures, for example) the various procedures are already predetermined to utilize for example, specific junction depths, doping concentrations as well as other parameters. Accordingly, the design of the Si-LEDs by using the standard IC design rules, require an adaptive approach, due to the above imposed constrains. The gain is that such design approach enables integration with the other devices on the same chip to yield monolithic structures