Abstract
Silicon nanowires are expected to have applications in transistors, sensors, resonators, solar cells and thermoelectric systems1,2,3,4,5. Understanding the surface properties and dopant distribution will be critical for the fabrication of high-performance devices based on nanowires6. At present, determination of the dopant concentration depends on a combination of experimental measurements of the mobility and threshold voltage7,8 in a nanowire field-effect transistor, a calculated value for the capacitance, and two assumptions—that the dopant distribution is uniform and that the surface (interface) charge density is known. These assumptions can be tested in planar devices with the capacitance–voltage technique9. This technique has also been used to determine the mobility of nanowires10,11,12,13, but it has not been used to measure surface properties and dopant distributions, despite their influence on the electronic properties of nanowires14,15. Here, we measure the surface (interface) state density and the radial dopant profile of individual silicon nanowire field-effect transistors with the capacitance–voltage technique.
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Acknowledgements
E.C.G. would like to thank the National Center for Electron Microscopy for use of their facilities, M. Fardy for help with FIB milling and Z. Zhang for help with imaging. Portions of this work were performed under the auspices of the National Science Foundation by University of California Berkeley under grant no. 0425914. The authors acknowledge the support of the MSD Focus Center, funded under the FCRP program of the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
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Garnett, E., Tseng, YC., Khanal, D. et al. Dopant profiling and surface analysis of silicon nanowires using capacitance–voltage measurements. Nature Nanotech 4, 311–314 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2009.43
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