The electroluminescence mechanism of Er3+ in different silicon oxide and silicon nitride environments

Rare earth doped metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) structures are of great interest for Si-based light emission. However, several physical limitations make it difficult to achieve the performance of light emitters based on compound semiconductors. To address this point, in this work the electroluminescence (EL) excitation and quenching mechanism of Er-implanted MOS structures with different designs of the dielectric stack are investigated. The devices usually consist of an injection layer made of SiO2 and an Er-implanted layer made of SiO2, Si-rich SiO2, silicon nitride or Si-rich silicon nitride. All structures implanted with Er show intense EL around 1540 nm with EL power efficiencies in the order of 2×10-3 (for SiO2:Er) or 2×10-4 (all other matrices) for lower current densities. The EL is excited by the impact of hot electrons with an excitation cross section in the range of 0.5-1.5×10-15 cm-2. Whereas the fraction of potentially excitable Er ions in SiO2 can reach values up to 50%, five times lower values were observed for other matrices. The decrease of the EL decay time for devices with Si-rich SiO2 or Si nitride compared to SiO2 as host matrix implies an increase of the number of defects adding additional non-radiative de-excitation paths for Er3+. For all investigated devices EL quenching cross sections in the 10-20 cm2 range and charge-to-breakdown values in the range of 1-10 Ccm-2 were measured. For the present design with a SiO2 acceleration layer, thickness reduction and the use of different host matrices did not improve the EL power efficiency or the operation lifetime, but strongly lowered the operation voltage needed to achieve intense EL.