Room-temperature silicon light-emitting diodes based on dislocation luminescence

We demonstrate electroluminescence (EL) with an external efficiency of more than 0.1% at room temperature from glide dislocations in silicon. The key to this achievement is a considerable reduction of nonradiative carrier recombination at dislocations due to impurities and core defects by impurity gettering and hydrogen passivation, respectively, which is shown by means of deep-level transient spectroscopy. Time-resolved EL measurements reveal a response time below 1.8 mus, which is much faster, compared to the band-to-band luminescence of bulk silicon. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.