Abstract. Let Ω be a bounded domain in R n , n ≥ 3, with a boundary ∂Ω ∈ C 2 . We consider the following singularly perturbed nonlinear elliptic problem on Ω:where the nonlinearity f is of subcritical growth. Under rather strong conditions on f, it has been known that for small ε > 0, there exists a mountain pass solution u ε of above problem which exhibits a spike layer near a maximum point of the distance function d from ∂Ω as ε → 0. In this paper, we construct a solution u ε of above problem which exhibits a spike layer near a maximum point of the distance function under certain conditions on f , which we believe to be almost optimal.