ABSTRACT
Silicon has served as the “work horse” material for the microelectronics industry where electrons are employed to transmit information. The industry has already perceived its end of development with regard to further raising the density of information storage and the speed of information processing. Optoelectronics and photonics are technologies
that partially or entirely use light for information manipulation. By replacing electronics with optoelectronics or photonics we can expect devices to run at incredible speeds. Other advantages of using light instead of electrons include reduced power consumption, enhanced reliability, higher volume efficiency, etc. Silicon and other Si-based materials, if they can emit strong light and allow relatively unsophisticated device fabrication, will be the first choice for optoelectronics and photonics. This is so because with its use decadesold silicon manufacturing expertise could still be exploited1, particularly when integration with electronics is of concern. Enormous effort has been devoted to the fabrication of silicon nanostructures that are expected to emit light across a wide, tunable spectral range, and with respectable efficiency2-4. Among the various possibilities, light emission from silicon nanoparticles embedded in confining films deserves particular attention. In this chapter we shall present a brief review of a low-temperature fabrication procedure involving conventional plasmaenhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) method, by which highdensity innate silicon nanoparticles are grown along with a silicon compound (oxide, nitride or carbide) film, thus making a composite nanostructure which has demonstrated excellent photoluminescence (PL) features. These include tunability across the whole of the visible light range5-13 and luminescence decay-time of a few nanoseconds10,13. After a brief introduction, we’ll first discuss the formation of the silicon particles in silane plasma which is the key process for the deposition of the silicon nanoparticles in its compound films and then present our experimental results on the light-emitting Si-in-SiOx, Si-in-SiNx and Si-in-SiC composite structures.
