Light propagation through textured surfaces

Although surface texturing is applied in various kinds of devices like sola r cells and light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the scattering phenomena occurrin g at textured surfaces have not been studied in detail yet. We present a no vel technique which allows the measurement of the angular distribution of l ight scattered at textured surfaces into a piece of semiconductor. It relie s on an integrated detector, because the scattered light cannot, in general , be detected externally. We give a detailed description of the main featur es of this method, focusing on the reliability of the results. Using this t echnique, we investigate the scattering at a surface textured by natural li thography for the application in LEDs.