Sulphur doped silicon light emitting diodes

• Main Author: Galata, Sotiria
• Published: University of Surrey 2005
• Subjects: 621.381522
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.418617

In this thesis light emission from sulphur related impurity in silicon has been reported. Although, sulphur related luminescence from silicon has been stated since the 1980's, no room temperature luminescence has been achieved and no compatible devices that can be integrated to the silicon technology have been invented. Photoluminescence and electroluminescence experiments were made on a set of samples implanted with only with sulphur at doses ranging from 1011-1014 S cm-2 at 30 keV, annealed at 1000 °C or 1100 °C for 10 s and on another set of samples implanted with sulphur as above and further implanted with boron at 1015 B cm-2 at 30 keV, further annealed at 950 °C for 1 min. The experiments revealed two major emissions at 1129.5 nm (1.0997 eV) which is due to the Si TO phonon assisted transition and at 1363 nm (0.9097 eV) which is due to sulphur related impurities. Variable temperature experiments were done at both PL and EL experiments. From the EL variable temperature measurements, it was observed that the two main lines were shifting towards longer wavelengths with the increase of temperature. Sulphur emission was present at room temperature with low intensity compared to the silicon emission which was more dominant at room temperature. Of great interest was the effect of power on silicon and sulphur emission. It has revealed a sublinear and a superlinear behaviour for the sulphur and silicon integrated intensity respectively with the increase of the injection condition, which can be attributed to the saturation of sulphur related levels responsible for the 1.33 nm emission at the high excitation levels. A model of the diffusion of sulphur concentration after the annealing treatments was presented, introducing the two cases of perfect reflection and perfect loss from the samples surfaces. Finally a model explaining our PL and EL power dependence experiments was provided which showed that there are two major radiative routes via the silicon and the sulphur that take place, which are competing at each other along with a non-radiative route coming from the sulphur related level. Our model describes the trends in our experimental data well. Finally, the energy related to the sulphur peak quenching was calculated to be 32.2 +/-1.4 meV.