We demonstrate femtosecond performance of an ultrabroadband high-index-contrast saturable Bragg reflector consisting of a silicon/silicon dioxide/germanium structure that is fully compatible with CMOS processing. This device offers a reflectivity bandwidth of over 700 nm and subpicosecond recovery time of the saturable loss. It is used to achieve mode locking of an Er-Yb:glass laser centered at...

Metallic quantum dots implanted in a silicon dioxide thin layer, grown on a silicon substrate, show promising field emission properties, giving an emission current of 1nA at electric fields as low as 5V/μm. This value is achieved for an implantation dose 5x10 16 ions/cm 2 , compared to 120 V/μm for the lowest dose. Electron microscopy reveals that the Co dots form metallic spheres, with a narro...

Good-quality silicon dioxide films have been deposited at low temperature (≤200 °C) using continuous and pulsed oxygen/silane plasmas coupled in a high-density, low-pressure helicon reactor. Although the total ion flux determines many of the structural properties of the deposited oxide, we have found that silicon-containing ions contribute to the film growth (up to 50 %) and appear to be respon...

Carrier lifetime degradation of reactive ion etch-processed silicon samples are investigated. Two types of carrier recombination: reversible and irreversible degradations induced by reactive ion etching (RIE) are identified. Irreversible carrier recombination is due to surface damage created by the RIE process that propagates a few microns deep into the silicon substrate. Reversible carrier rec...

This paper describes how capacitance–voltage (C-V) and Kelvin probe (KP) measurements can be combined to determine the magnitude and centroid of the electric charge in a thin-film insulator. The technique is demonstrated on three films of relevance to silicon solar cells: aluminium oxide, amorphous silicon nitride and silicon dioxide. Since the charge within these films is of different magnitud...

We demonstrate piezoresistive transduction of mechanical motion from out-of-plane flexural micromechanical resonators made from stacked thin films. The resonators are fabricated from two highly doped polycrystalline silicon layers separated by an interlayer dielectric. We examine two interlayer materials: thermal silicon dioxide and stoichiometric silicon nitride. We show that via one-time diel...

Micro power sources are required to be used in autonomous microelectromechanical system (MEMS). In this paper, we designed and fabricated a three dimensional (3D) MEMS supercapacitor, which is consisting of conformal silicon dioxide/titanium/polypyrrole (PPy) layers on silicon substrate. At first, through-structure was fabricated on the silicon substrate by high-aspect-ratio deep reactive ion e...

A gas-phase, room-temperature, plasmaless isotropic etching system has been used for bulk and thin lm silicon etching. A computer controlled multi-chambered etcher is used to provide precisely metered pulses of xenon di uoride (XeF2) gas to the etch chamber. Etch rates as high as 15 microns per minute have been observed. The etch appears to have in nite selectivity to many common thin lms, incl...

We report on a novel design of an on-chip optical temperature sensor based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration where the two arms consist of hybrid waveguides providing opposite temperature-dependent phase changes to enhance the temperature sensitivity of the sensor. The sensitivity of the fabricated sensor with silicon/polymer hybrid waveguides is measured to be 172 pm/°C, which is ...