Refractory doped titanium nitride nanoscale field emitters

Refractory materials exhibit high damage tolerance, which is attractive for the creation of nanoscale field-emission electronics and optoelectronics applications that require operation at high peak current densities and optical intensities. Recent results have demonstrated that the optical propertie...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-11
Main Authors: Nardi, Alberto, Turchetti, Marco, Britton, Wesley A, Chen, Yuyao, Yang, Yujia, Luca Dal Negro, Berggren, Karl K, Keathley, Phillip D
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aspect ratio
CMOS
Damage tolerance
Electronics
Emission
Emitters
Nanostructure
Nanotechnology devices
Optical properties
Optoelectronic devices
Photodiodes
Quantum efficiency
Refractory materials
Silicon
Silicon oxynitride
Titanium
Titanium nitride
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Summary:Refractory materials exhibit high damage tolerance, which is attractive for the creation of nanoscale field-emission electronics and optoelectronics applications that require operation at high peak current densities and optical intensities. Recent results have demonstrated that the optical properties of titanium nitride, a refractory and CMOS-compatible plasmonic material, can be tuned by adding silicon and oxygen dopants. However, to fully leverage the potential of titanium (silicon oxy)nitride, a reliable and scalable fabrication process with few-nm precision is needed. In this work, we developed a fabrication process for producing engineered nanostructures with gaps between 10 and 15 nm, aspect ratios larger than 5 with almost 90{\deg} steep sidewalls. Using this process, we fabricated large-scale arrays of electrically-connected bow-tie nanoantennas with few-nm free-space gaps. We measured a typical variation of 4 nm in the average gap size. Using applied DC voltages and optical illumination, we tested the electronic and optoelectronic response of the devices, demonstrating sub-10-V tunneling operation across the free-space gaps, and quantum efficiency of up to 1E-3 at 1.2 {\mu}m, which is comparable to a bulk silicon photodiode at the same wavelength. Tests demonstrated that the titanium silicon oxynitride nanostructures did not significantly degrade, exhibiting less than 5 nm of shrinking of the average gap dimensions over few-{\mu}m^2 areas after roughly 6 hours of operation. Our results will be useful for developing the next generation of robust and CMOS-compatible nanoscale devices for high-speed and low-power field-emission electronics and optoelectronics applications.
ISSN:2331-8422