Visible electroluminescence from porous silicon

Abstract

It is demonstrated that photoluminescent porous Si (PS) layers exhibit definitely visible electroluminescence (EL). The PS layers were formed by anodization of single-crystal nondegenerate p-type Si wafers in an HF solution. The experimental EL cells are of the form semitransparent metal/PS layer/p-type Si/Al electrode. These cells show a rectifying junction behavior. When the forward current density reaches a certain value, stable visible (orange) light is uniformly emitted through a semitransparent electrode. A possible explanation of this is the radiative transition due to electron and hole injection into quantized states in PS.