Two terminal and multiterminal efficient planar Silicon Light Emitting Devices (Si-LED's) fabricated by standard IC technology as components for all silicon monolithic integrated optoelectronic systems

Abstract

Summary form only given. 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, 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 by using this approach 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 two terminal and multi terminal Si-LEDs designed and realized by us, as well as experimental results describing their performance are presented. These Si-LEDs were designed by us using conventional IC design rules and were fabricated to our specifications utilizing standard CMOS/BiCMOS technology. The gain is that such design approach enables the fabrication of integrated all silicon monolithic electrooptical systems by utilizing SiLEDs/SiDetectors pairs.