Publications Repository - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Electronics has been dominated by silicon since half a century. Si will dominate electronics another decade, however its functionality might change from classical field-controlled currents through channels (the Field Effect Transistor FET) to quantum mechanical effects like field-controlled hopping of single electrons to a quantum dot (Single Electron Transistor SET). The SET is the champion of low-power consumption. This is attractive for the Internet of Things: more and more devices need batteries and plugs. Together with improved batteries, advanced computation must be delivered at extremely low-power consumption. At low temperatures, the functionality of SETs has been proven. Large-scale use of SETs requires room temperature operation, which can be achieved with tiny Si dots (<4 nm) in SiO2, exactly located between source and drain with distances of ~1…2 nm. Manufacturability of such nanostructures is the roadblock for large-scale use of SETs. Lithography cannot deliver such feature sizes. Therefore, there are currently intense studies to fulfill these requirements by self-organization processes. The ion beam technique is a well-established technology in microelectronics used for doping and amorphization, and even for ion beam mixing [1]. The parameters of ion beam processing are very well controllable. We searched for a self-organization process in a vertical silicon nanowire with an embedded, very thin (~6nm) SiO2 layer. Ion beam mixing transforms this layer to metastable SiOx. If the nanowire is thin enough, a subsequent thermal treatment leads by phase separation to a single Si nanodot (~3nm) self-aligned to the lower and upper Si at distances of <2nm. Here, we present 3D computer simulations on ion beam mixing (TRI3DYN code [2]) and Si nanodot formation (3D kinetic Monte Carlo code [3]). Such simulations predicted successfully the fabrication of non-volatile memories using ion beam mixing [4]. Experimentally, single Si nanodot formation has been proven by local mixing in a c-Si/SiO2/a-Si layer stack. The nanoscale mixing has been performed with a Helium Ion Microscope using an Argon beam of ~2nm diameter. After Rapid Thermal Annealing, the self-organized single Si nanodot has been imaged by cross-section energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy EFTEM. In a vertical nanowire the very small volume of mixed SiO2 is not due to nanoscale ion beams but due to the small diameter of the wire. It will be shown, how a vertical nanowire gate-all-around SETs operating at room temperature can be CMOS-compatibly fabricated by this method.
This work has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant
agreement No 688072.
[1] K.H. Heinig, T. Müller, B. Schmidt, M. Strobel, W. Möller, Appl. Phys. A77 (2003) 17.
[2] W. Möller, NIM B322 (2014) 23.
[3] M. Strobel, K.-H. Heinig, W. Möller, Phys. Rev. B64 (2001) 245422.
[4] T. Mueller et al., Appl .Phys. Lett. 81 (2002) 3049; ibid 85 (2004) 2373.