The technology of solid phase growth of multilayer structures with buried nanosize magnesium silicide clusters has been developed. Basing on the experimental data, a conclusion was made that magnesium silicide clusters remain in depth of the Si layers at 650 • C and give a contribution in the effective dielectric permeability and effective electron number of multilayer structures. The huge increase of a thermoelectric power coefficient for samples with buried magnesium silicide clusters in comparing with one for the bare p-type silicon substrate has been observed.

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By using solid phase epitaxy of thin Fe films and molecular beam epitaxy of Si, a p+-Si/p-Si/β-FeSi2 nanocrystallites/n-Si(111) diode structure was fabricated. Transmission electron microscopy data confirmed a well-defined multilayered structure with embedded nanocrystallites of two typical sizes: 3–4 and 15–20 nm, and almost coherent epitaxy of the nanocrystallites with the Si matrix. The diode at zero bias conditions exhibited a current responsivity of 1.7 mA/W, an external quantum efficiency of about 0.2%, and a specific detectivity of 1.2 × 109 cm × Hz1/2/W at a wavelength of 1300 nm at room temperature. In the avalanche mode, the responsivity reached up to 20 mA/W (2% in terms of efficiency) with a value of avalanche gain equal to 5. The data obtained indicate that embedding of β-FeSi2 nanocrystallites into the depletion region of the Si p-n junction results in expansion of the spectral sensitivity up to 1600 nm and an increase of the photoresponse by more than two orders of magnitude in comparison with a conventional Si p-n junction. Thereby, fabricated structure combines advantage of the silicon photodiode functionality and simplicity with near infrared light detection capability of β-FeSi2.