Near-infrared and Mid-infrared Light Emission of Boron-doped Crystalline Silicon

The bottleneck in achieving fully integrated silicon photonics lies in silicon-based light-emitting devices that are compatible with standard CMOS technology. Dislocation loops by implanting boron into silicon and annealing represents an enticing strategy to transform highly inefficient silicon into a luminescent material. However, the emission at telecommunication wavelength suffers from the strong thermal quenching effect, resulting in low efficiency at room temperature. Here, we applied a new deep cooling process to address this issue. Interestingly, we find that electrons and holes recombine through defects emitting two photons, one in near infrared (NIR, 1.3~1.6 μm) and the other in mid-infrared band (MIR, around 3.5 μm). The PL intensity at NIR increases by three folds when the temperature increases from 77 K to 300K. Furthermore, the NIR light emission of reverse biased silicon diodes was significantly enhanced compared to forward bias, emitting the maximum output power of 42 nW at 60 mA. The results offer new opportunities for the development of IR light sources in integrated circuits.