Individual Atomic Imaging of Multiple Dopant Sites in As-Doped Si Using Spectro-Photoelectron Holography.

The atomic scale characterization of dopant atoms in semiconductor devices to establish correlations with the electrical activation of these atoms is essential to the advancement of contemporary semiconductor process technology. Spectro-photoelectron holography combined with first-principles simulations can determine the local three-dimensional atomic structures of dopant elements, which in turn affect their electronic states. In the work reported herein, this technique was used to examine arsenic (As) atoms doped into a silicon (Si) crystal. As 3d core level photoelectron spectroscopy demonstrated the presence of three types of As atoms at a total concentration of approximately 1020 cm-3, denoted as BEH, BEM, and BEL. On the basis of Hall effect measurements, the BEH atoms corresponded to electrically active As occupying substitutional sites and exhibiting larger thermal fluctuations than the Si atoms, while the BEM atoms corresponded to electrically inactive As embedded in the AsnV (n = 2-4) type clusters. Finally, the BEL atoms were assigned to electrically inactive As in locally disordered structures.

Quantum size effects in GaAs nanodisks fabricated using a combination of the bio-template technique and neutral beam etching.

We successfully fabricated defect-free, distributed and sub-20-nm GaAs quantum dots (named GaAs nanodisks (NDs)) by using a novel top-down technique that combines a new bio-template (PEGylated ferritin) and defect-free neutral beam etching (NBE). Greater flexibility was achieved when engineering the quantum levels of ND structures resulted in greater flexibility than that for a conventional quantum dot structure because structures enabled independent control of thickness and diameter parameters. The ND height was controlled by adjusting the deposition thickness, while the ND diameter was controlled by adjusting the hydrogen-radical treatment conditions prior to NBE. Photoluminescence emission due to carrier recombination between the ground states of GaAs NDs was observed, which showed that the emission energy shift depended on the ND diameters. Quantum level engineering due to both diameter and thickness was verified from the good agreement between the PL emission energy and the calculated quantum confinement energy.