Improved power efficiency in phosphorus doped n-a-SiNxOy/p-Si heterojunction light emitting diode

Abstract

The higher up to 60% internal quantum efficiency of photoluminescence (PL) from amorphous silicon oxynitride (a-SiNxOy) films has been reported in our previous work. In present work, the improved power efficiency visible light emitting diode (LED) has been realized based on phosphorus doped n-a-SiNxOy/p-Si heterojunction structure, which is at least three times higher than that of ITO/a-SiNxOy/p-Si (called MIS) LED. The n-a-SiNxOy films were doped by using phosphine (PH3) gas during the deposition by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition technique and the electron concentration is about 2.4 × 1015 cm−3 at room temperature obtained from Hall-effect measurements. The light emitting (electroluminescence (EL)) peak energy is coincided with that of PL of a-SiNxOy, which suggests that the EL emission is also originated from the radiative recombination via N-Si-O bonding defect states in n-a-SiNxOy layers. The transport mechanism and optical performance of the device have been investigated with the characteristics of current-voltage (I-V) and light output-voltage (L-V), in terms of the energy band diagram of n-a-SiNxOy/p-Si heterojunction structure. The power law like L ∼ Im of light output-current (L ∼ I) characteristic in n-a-SiNxOy/p-Si heterojunction has also been observed, which exhibits a superlinear behaviour with a slope of 1.35 in the low current range and becomes almost linear with a slope of 1.05 in the high current range, due to the saturation of nonradiative recombination centers.