M. Perálvarez

Field effect luminescence from Si nanocrystals obtained by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition

Field effect induced luminescence has been achieved by alternate tunnel injection of electrons and holes into Si nanocrystals. The emitting device is a metal-oxide-semiconductor structure with a semitransparent polycrystalline Si contact ∼250nm thick and a silicon-rich silicon oxide layer of about 40nm deposited on a p-type Si substrate by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The electroluminescence is optimized for a Si excess of 17% and annealing at 1250°C for 1h in nitrogen-rich atmosphere. The pulsed emission presents typical decay times of ∼5μs and external quantum efficiencies of ∼0.03%.

Si-nanocrystal-based LEDs fabricated by ion implantation and plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition

An in-depth study of the physical and electrical properties of Si-nanocrystal-based MOSLEDs is presented. The active layers were fabricated with different concentrations of Si by both ion implantation and plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition. Devices fabricated by ion implantation exhibit a combination of direct current and field-effect luminescence under a bipolar pulsed excitation. The onset of the emission decreases with the Si excess from 6 to 3 V. The direct current emission is attributed to impact ionization and is associated with the reasonably high current levels observed in current-voltage measurements. This behaviour is in good agreement with transmission electron microscopy images that revealed a continuous and uniform Si nanocrystal distribution. The emission power efficiency is relatively low, approximately 10(-3)%, and the emission intensity exhibits fast degradation rates, as revealed from accelerated ageing experiments. Devices fabricated by chemical deposition only exhibit field-effect luminescence, whose onset decreases with the Si excess from 20 to 6 V. The absence of the continuous emission is explained by the observation of a 5 nm region free of nanocrystals, which strongly reduces the direct current through the gate. The main benefit of having this nanocrystal-free region is that tunnelling current flow assisted by nanocrystals is blocked by the SiO2 stack so that power consumption is strongly reduced, which in return increases the device power efficiency up to 0.1%. In addition, the accelerated ageing studies reveal a 50% degradation rate reduction as compared to implanted structures.

Efficiency and reliability enhancement of silicon nanocrystal field-effect luminescence from nitride-oxide gate stacks

We report on a field-effect light emitting device based on silicon nanocrystals in silicon oxide deposited by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The device shows high power efficiency and long lifetime. The power efficiency is enhanced up to ∼0.1% by the presence of a silicon nitride control layer. The leakage current reduction induced by this nitride buffer effectively increases the power efficiency two orders of magnitude with regard to similarly processed devices with solely oxide. In addition, the nitride cools down the electrons that reach the polycrystalline silicon gate lowering the formation of defects, which significantly reduces the device degradation.

DC and AC electroluminescence in silicon nanoparticles embedded in silicon-rich oxide films

Electroluminescent properties of silicon-rich oxide (SRO) films were studied using metal oxide semiconductor-(MOS)-like devices. Thin SRO films with 4 at.% of silicon excess were deposited by low pressure chemical vapour deposition followed by a thermal annealing at 1100 degrees C. Intense continuous visible and infrared luminescence has been observed when devices are reversely and forwardly bias, respectively. After an electrical stress, the continuous electroluminescence (EL) is quenched but devices show strong field-effect EL with pulsed polarization. A model based on conductive paths--across the SRO film--has been proposed to explain the EL behaviour in these devices.