Electrical and optical characterisation of TiN porous Si/Si structures

In this paper, the electrical and optical behaviour of a new porous silicon (PS) based structure based on a titanium nitride (TiN) covered PS structure has been studied. Titanium nitride was deposited by radio frequency (r.f.) pulverisation of titanium under nitrogen atmosphere. A rectifying behaviour has been observed from the I-V curves of the structures, which suggests a Schottky-like junction. The change in the electrical parameters such as the ideality factor, resistivity of the film, series resistance (R-s), etc. as a function of deposition time is discussed. The value of the refractive index of the TiN layers is found to be 1.04 to 1.09. The values of the extinction coefficient k indicate that the TiN layers are transparent. In addition, spectral response and spectrophotometric measurements of the TiN/PS/Si structure were performed. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.