Growth of dielectric-embedded silicon nanocrystallites for silicon integrated photonics

Abstract

Silicon integrated photonics has attracted much attentions recently because of the available of silicon-based quantum devices and optical components. Dielectric films with embedded silicon nanocrystallites (Si-NCs) have been recognized as one of the promising light-emitting materials for this purpose. This work reviews some attempts reported recently for preparing dielectric-embedded Si-NCs based on the conventional CMOS processes. The mechanism for the Si-NCs formation is discussed. The material and light emitting properties of the as-prepared Si-NC embedded in dielectric films are studied in detail.

Growth and characterization of amorphous Si based multilayer structures

“…Besides, plasma vapor deposition of Si alloy thin films that contain excess Si is another widely used method to achieve Si nanoclusters [34,54,59,146]. The luminescence properties of Si nanoclusters in these films are very similar to those of PS, with a wide Literature Review emission band observed at room temperature and spectral position that depends on the Si nanocrystal sizes [132,134,142,147]. The size of the crystallites in these films can be controlled by the amount of excess Si and thermal annealing that promotes the aggregation of excess Si atoms and results in their crystallization [70,148,149].…”

“…optoelectronic device applications, Si quantum dots in a Si nitride matrix is advantageous over a Si oxide matrix because electrons and holes can be easily transported to the a-Si quantum dots (QD) due to its lower tunneling barrier[52,54,146,147,149,150,[152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159]. Aydmli et al[59] studied Si clusters in Si nitride and for near stoichiometry Si nitride, they observed PL with a peak energy of 2.5 eV, which was attributed to quantum confinement of electron hole pairs in the Si clusters.…”