Abstract
It has been thought that silicon (Si) is a material inapplicable to active optical devices, such as light-emitting diode (LED), because of its indirect electronic band structure. However, Prof. Kensho Okamoto, who is one of the authors, found the fact that commercially available Si photodiodes emitted infra-red light, and he developed an original and unique two-way optical communication system in which each Si photodiode (Si-PD) played two roles of light-emitting diode and light-receiver.
In this study, we observed directly infra-red light emission from a PN Si-PD and a PIN Si-PD using a infra-red camera and measured the emission spectra of the Si-PDs. Further, we succeeded in sending and receiving of light signal at room temperature between two PN Si-PDs, between two PIN Si-PDs, and also between a Si-PD and an InGaAs photodiode
In this paper, we introduce our novel sending and receiving of light signal system using Si-PD as LED.
