Experimental Verification of the Mechanism of Hot-Carrier-Induced Photon Emission in N-MOSFET's using an Overlapping CCD Gate Structure

In this paper, new experimental data are presented to verify the physical mechanism of hot-carrier-induced photon emission in n-MOSFET's. Using MOSFET's with an overlapping CCD gate structure, we bias the multiple gates to create hot-electron populations either at the drain junction or at the interelectrode gap regions. Our results show that the magnitudes of the photon-generated minority carrier collected were comparable for hot-carrier-induced photons emitted from the drain junction and from the interelectrode gap regions, although the density of oppositely charged Coulomb centers (i.e., ionized drain dopants) available for Bremsstrahlung in the interelectrode gap region is zero. These results show unambiguously that, for above-bandgap low-energy photons, Bremsstrahlung of hot electrons in the Coulomb field of oppositely charged centers is not the dominant mechanism responsible for hot-carrier-induced photon emission in n-MOSFET's. © 1992 IEEE