Suppression of Hole Overflow and Enhancement of Light Emission Efficiency in Si Quantum Dots Based Silicon Nitride Light Emitting Diodes

We present an effective method to suppress the hole overflow in Si quantum dots-based silicon nitride (SiN) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) by employing nanocrystalline Si (nc-Si) layer as hole blocking layer inserted between the SiN luminescent active layer and p-Si anode. The proposed devices exhibit strong white light emission under forward bias conditions. In comparison to the LEDs without nc-Si interlayer, a significant enhancement of more than 200% in light emission efficiency is achieved from the proposed devices. The increment in EL efficiency is found to strongly depend on the thickness of nc-Si interlayer. Besides, the proposed devices show a low turn-on voltage of 6 V, which is the same as that of the device without nc-Si interlayer. The analysis of the dominant recombination process indicates that the improved emission efficiency is resulting from the increased bimolecular radiative recombination probability, which is attributed to the effective hole-blocking effect of nc-Si barrier that mitigates the unbalance injections between electrons and holes in the SiN active layer by suppressing hole overflow.