Light emission from MOS tunnel diodes

Special MOS tunneling structures which, avoiding the obscuring effects of the polysilicon layer, exhibit excellent light emission characteristics, have been fabricated and tested. For the first time, it is shown that the experimental photon energy distributions of MOS tunnel diodes biased in the Fowler-Nordheim regime exhibit a peak at about 1.6 eV, likely due to hot-carrier radiative recombination phenomena.