CMOS platforms operating at the telecommunications wavelength either reside within the highly dissipative two-photon regime in silicon-based optical devices, or possess small nonlinearities. Bandgap engineering of non-stoichiometric silicon nitride using state-of-the-art fabrication techniques has led to our development of USRN (ultra-silicon-rich nitride) in the form of Si7N3, that possesses a...

Silicon nitride is the most commonly used passivation layer in biosensor applications where electronic components must be interfaced with ionic solutions. Unfortunately, the predominant method for functionalizing silicon nitride surfaces, silane chemistry, suffers from a lack of reproducibility. As an alternative, we have developed a silane-free pathway that allows for the direct functionalizat...

We demonstrate the use of copolymer micelle lithography using polystyrene-block-poly(2-vinylpyridine) reverse micelle thin films in their as-coated form to create nanopillars with tunable dimensions and spacing, on different substrates such as silicon, silicon oxide, silicon nitride and quartz. The promise of the approach as a versatile application oriented platform is highlighted by demonstrat...

We designed and fabricated free-standing, waveguide-coupled silicon nitride microdisks hybridly integrated with embedded colloidal quantum dots. An efficient coupling of quantum dot emission to resonant disk modes and eventually to the access waveguides is demonstrated. The amount of light coupled out to the access waveguide can be tuned by controlling its dimensions and offset with the disk ed...

2014 The effects on fast surface state density due to high-temperature hydrogen anneals through windows in the silicon nitride layer next to the active MNOS regions are presented. A marked geometry effect is observed as a result of the occurring lateral hydrogen diffusion mechanism. Besides this lateral diffusion process, a vertical hydrogen diffusion through the nitride layer is observed at te...

In this paper we present the first investigation of a batch method for folding of threedimensional micrometer-sized silicon nitride structures by capillary forces. Silicon nitride tubes have been designed and fabricated using DRIE at the center of the planar origami patterns of the structures. Water is brought to the structures by pumping the liquid through the wafer via those tubes. Isolated m...

Self-standing highly crystallized hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) mono-, bi- and few-layers have been obtained for the first time via the Polymer Derived Ceramics (PDCs) route by adding lithium nitride (Li₃N) micropowders to liquid-state polyborazylene (PBN). Incorporation of Li₃N as a crystallization promoter allows the onset of crystallization of h-BN at a lower temperature (1200 °C) than unde...

A monolithic photonic microcantilever device is presented comprising silicon light sources and detectors self-aligned to suspended silicon nitride waveguides all integrated into the same silicon chip. A silicon nitride waveguide optically links a silicon light emitting diode to a detector. Then, the optocoupler releases a localized formation of resist-silicon nitride cantilevers through e-beam ...

By comparing the etching characteristics of silicon and silicon nitride in CF4 /O2 /N2 microwave downstream plasmas we demonstrate clearly how low concentrations of energetic species can play a dominant role in remote plasma processing: Injection of 5% N2 to a CF4 /O2 plasma increases the silicon nitride etch rate by a factor of 7, while not significantly affecting the bulk composition of the d...

The aim of the present review is to highlight the state of the art in high-pressure design of new advanced materials based on boron nitride. Recent experimental achievements on the governing phase transformation, nanostructuring and chemical synthesis in the systems containing boron nitride at high pressures and high temperatures are presented. All these developments allowed discovering new mat...