A novel silicon electro-optic device for sensor applications

Though R. Newman reported the avalanche breakdown light emission in a conventional p-n junction diode half a century ago, there are almost no successful applications of this phenomenon in industry. We report the realization of a novel silicon electro-optic device, explicitly the integration of light emitting diode antifuse and photodetector on a single silicon wafer by CMOS technology, and the first important results. The diode antifuse (called antifuse to the rest of this contribution) resembles a conventional diode but has a small size of a few tens of nanometers, which permits easy collection of all emitted photons