Hot Electron Light Emitting Semiconductor Heterojunction Devices (Hellish) — Type — 1 and Type — 2

Abstract

One of the draw-backs of the conventional light emitters appears to be that the light emission is confined to a small region of the facets of the devices1. Thus, the compatibility in generic integration technology remains a problem. The research on simple devices that emit light from the surface with good control of wavelength tunability, and which can be fabricated in large scale 2- dimensional arrays has been largely stimulated by potential applications in optical signal processing. One possible candidate for such a simple functional device is the light emitting charge injection transistor (CHINT) 2. Another light emitter, HELLISH-1 (Hot Electron Light Emission and Lasing in Semiconductor Heterostructures) has been proposed by us3–5. In this paper we present a novel surface emitting device, HELLISH-2 and demonstrate its operation with a simple model. We also report the results of our recent studies on a heavily p-n doped HELLISH-1 device.