科研之友
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摘要
Conductive diamond tips are routinely used today for high-resolution electrical characterization of semiconductor structures. The formation of such tips is accomplished via a moulding technique where micron-size inverted pyramids are anisotropically wet-etched into silicon. Although this technique results in sharp and highly conductive solid diamond tips, the functional yield of the formed tips is limited to about 50% whereby most tips are rejected because of poor conductivity at the tip apex and/or too large tip radius. Fundamental insight is missing with regard to the formation of the diamond film at the moulds and the cause of the low yield. Therefore, this study is focused on the first step of the diamond tip formation, which is the seeding of the moulds. The seeding density close to the apex of the inverted pyramid as well as the presence of a diamond seed at the apex, are parameters that influence the tip quality. In the current work, we studied the correlation between the concentrations of the ethanol-based seeding dispersion with the nano-diamond seeding density at the moulds. We show that the number of moulds that contain one diamond seed exactly at the apex can be tuned accordingly to the concentration of the dispersion whereas the seeding density close to the apex of the moulds is fixed at similar to 3 . 10(10) cm(-2). Additionally, we demonstrate that the seed layers at the moulds with this seeding density lead to a closed diamond layer of 50 nm thickness after a short period of growth time.
- 出版日期2013-5
