Silicon based near infrared light emitting diodes (LED)

Japanese scientists through quantum dots (quantum dot) to help successfully to produce silicon (silicon-based) light emitting diode (LED), the luminescence band near infrared light, and the external quantum efficiency (external quantum efficiency) up to 0.3%.

The Japanese University of Tokyo Susumu Fukatsu et al team using molecular beam epitaxy (molechlar beam epitaxy) component is made, mainly in the silicon substrate is embedded into the strain of GaSb quantum dots (strained GaSb quantum dot). At absolute temperature 11K, driven by 4V bias and the current of 3.7mA, the component can produce intense fluorescence at about 1.2 microns. What is more, the use of pulsed voltage driven experiments show that the light-emitting diode can be modulated, so it can be used to transmit data.

The electronics industry is interested in the development of high efficiency and high speed silicon based light-emitting diodes, because it helps to achieve high speed optical communication between chips. The biggest problem is that the silicon has only indirect bandgap (indirect), which can not be naturally luminous, so it must be achieved by doping other materials. A little earlier STMicro Electronics was doped in silicon doped with erbium ions, the Japanese team is to use the III-V quantum dots to change the internal electronic behavior of silicon.