Fabrication of silicon nanocrystals and its room temperature luminescence effects

Silicon (Si) nanocrystals have been considered a good candidate for flash memory device and nanophotonic applications. The fabrication of nanocrystal memory is to form uniform, small size and high density quantum dots. In this study, nanometer-scale silicon quantum dots have been fabricated on ultrathin silicon oxide layer using amorphous silicon (a-Si) deposition followed by various annealing treatments. The a-Si layers were crystallized using furnace annealing, laser annealing and rapid thermal annealing (RTA). After annealing to form nanometer-sized crystallites, silicon wet etch was carried out to isolate the nanocrystals. The size, uniformity and density of the nanocrystals were successfully controlled by different annealing treatments. The mean dot height and mean dot diameter is 1-5 nm and 2-5 nm. respectively. Lateral growth of the silicon dots was further controlled by systemic variations of the annealing conditions. It is found that the annealed a-Si films exhibit room temperature visible photoluminescence (PL) resulting from the formation of nanometer-sized crystallites. Selective wet etch and Secco-etch treatment increased the PL efficiency that is useful for narrophotonics applications. The feasibility of quantum dot formation using ultra thin amorphous Si films is demonstrated in this work.