Silicon nitride nanowires were synthesized using silicon monoxide as raw materials and an alumina plate as substrate at 1500°C. The obtained nanowires were characterized by X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectrosco‐ py, scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution trans‐ mission electron microscopy and thermogravimetricdifferential scanning calorimetry. The results revealed that...

The water content of phosphoric acid in etching silicon nitride and silicon dioxide plays an important role. An increase in water content increases the etch rate of silicon nitride and decreases the etch rate of silicon dioxide. The highest possible temperature for a fixed water content at atmospheric pressure in the system H2O-P2O5 is realized by boiling the liquid and refluxing the vapor phas...

A new method of fabricating high aspect ratio nanostructures in silicon without the use of sub-micron lithographic technique is reported. The proposed method comprises two important steps including the use of CMOS spacer technique to form silicon nitride nanostructure masking followed by deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) of the silicon substrate to form the final silicon nanostructures. Silicon ...

Silicon nitride and silicon nitride-based ceramics have several favorable material properties, such as high hardness and good wear resistance, which makes them important materials for the coating industry. This thesis focuses the synthesis of silicon nitride, silicon oxynitride, and silicon carbonitride thin films by reactive magnetron sputtering. The films were characterized based on their che...

The biocompatibility and biofouling of the microfabrication materials for a MEMS drug delivery device have been evaluated. The in vivo inflammatory and wound healing response of MEMS drug delivery component materials, metallic gold, silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, silicon, and SU-8(TM) photoresist, were evaluated using the cage implant system. Materials, placed into stainless-steel cages, wer...

rapid thermal processing (rtp) has become a key technology for semiconductor device manufacturing in a variety of applications, such as thermal oxidation, annealing, and thin-film growth. hence, understanding the radiative properties of silicon and other relevant materials is essential for the analysis of the thermal transport processes. we have analyzed and calculated the spectral, directional...

A defect grating in a silicon on insulator waveguide is simulated. We consider spectral changes in the optical transmission when a thin silicon nitride or silicon tip is scanned across the defect. The tip perturbs the resonance field, moving its peak wavelength and possibly changing its shape and quality factor. For the nitride tip, the influence is mostly a spectral shift; for silicon, the cha...

Stimulated emission from sensitized erbium ions in silicon-rich silicon nitride is demonstrated by pump-probe measurements carried out in waveguides. A decrease in the photoinduced absorption of the probe at the wavelength of erbium emission is observed and is attributed to stimulated emission from erbium excited indirectly via localized states in the silicon nitride matrix.

This paper describes a nano-scale tensile test to study the fatigue properties of LPCVD silicon nitride thin films using a novel electrostatic actuator design. Mechanical-amplifier devices made in silicon nitride thin films can apply controllable tensile stress (2.0–7.8 GPa) to test structures with relatively low actuation voltages (5.7–35.4 VRMS) at the resonant frequencies of the devices. The...

Silicon nitride based ceramics are promising candidates for biomedical applications due to their chemical and dimensional stability associated to suitable mechanical strength and relatively high fracture toughness. However, the bioinert characteristics of these ceramics limit their application to situations where the formation of chemical bonds between the material and the tissue are not essent...