Carrier lifetime measurement on electroluminescent metal-oxide-silicon tunneling diodes

The temporal response of the electroluminescence at the Si band gap energy from a metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) tunneling diode is used to characterize the minority carrier lifetime near the Si/SiO₂ interface. The temporal responses reveal that the Shockley-Read-Hall (SRH) recombination lifetimes are 18 and 25.8 μs for the rising and falling edges, respectively, and that the ratio for SRH, radiative, and Auger recombinations is 1:0.196:0.096 at injection current density of 39 A/cm². The investigation shows that the electroluminescence of the MOS tunneling diode can be significantly increased by reducing the number of the nonradiative recombination centers.