The influence of reactor wall conditions on the characteristics of high density fluorocarbon plasma etch processes has been studied. Results obtained during the etching of oxide, nitride, and silicon in an inductively coupled plasma source fed with various feedgases, such as CHF3 , C3F6 , and C3F6/H2 , indicate that the reactor wall temperature is an important parameter in the etch process. Ade...

We present a technique to trim the resonance of silicon ring resonators. The cladding oxide is compacted by electron beam bombardment, causing strain in the silicon lattice, which leads to a 5 nm resonance shift.

Aluminum-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) [AZO] is a good candidate to be used as a transparent conducting oxide [TCO]. For solar cells having a hydrogenated amorphous silicon carbide [a-SiC:H] or hydrogenated amorphous silicon [a-Si:H] window layer, the use of the AZO as TCO results in a deterioration of fill factor [FF], so fluorine-doped tin oxide (Sn02:F) [FTO] is usually preferred as a TCO. In th...

Bonded silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers have the capability of realizing monolithic pixel devices, where the silicon resistivity is optimized separately for the electronics and detector parts. Using UNIBOND wafers, we are developing monolithic pixel devices fabricated with OKI Semiconductor 0.20 mm FD-SOI technology. A set of PMOS and NMOS transistors were irradiated with protons in order to i...

Valenceand conduction-band edges of ultrathin oxides SiO2, HfO2, Hf0.7Si0.3O2, ZrO2, and Al2O3 grown on a silicon substrate have been measured using ultraviolet photoemission and inverse photoemission spectroscopies in the same UHV chamber. The combination of these two techniques has enabled the direct determination of the oxide energy gaps as well as the offsets of the oxide valenceand conduct...

This thesis presents an integrated study of high efficiency photoanodes for water splitting using silicon and iron-oxide. The fundamental limitations of silicon to water splitting applications were overcome by an ultrathin iron-oxide film stack and a pH-adjusted electrochemical environment. It was experimentally demonstrated that this functional photoanode has very strong photoactivity exceedin...

A corona discharge is used to create and store negative charge in the silicon nitride films of silicon dioxide/silicon nitride stacks. Effective lifetime measurements on both textured and planar, as well as both boron diffused and undiffused silicon samples passivated with silicon oxide/silicon nitride stacks, show that the creation of negative charge in the nitride layer results in an improvem...

To realize the nanofabrication of silicon surfaces using atomic force microscopy (AFM), we investigated the etching of mechanically processed oxide masks using potassium hydroxide (KOH) solution. The dependence of the KOH solution etching rate on the load and scanning density of the mechanical pre-processing was evaluated. Particular load ranges were found to increase the etching rate, and the ...

The non-volatile memory is a crucial functionality for wide range of applications in photonic integrated circuits, however, it still poses challenge silicon technology. This problem has been overcome the microelectronic industry by using SONOS (silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon) cells, which non-volatility enabled dielectric trapping layer such as nitride. Analogously, this work, similar appr...