Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten

DS 1: Application of Thin Films

DS 1.2: Talk

Monday, March 31, 2014, 09:45–10:00, CHE 91

Properties of Sol-Gel derived Ge nanocrystals embedded in thin SiO₂ layers — •Ansgar Dominique Donner¹, Sebastian Knebel¹, Ivana Capan², Harald Rösner¹, Hartmut Bracht¹, and Gerhard Wilde¹ — ¹Institute of Materials Physics, WWU Münster, Münster, Germany — ²Ruder Bošković Institute, Zagreb, Croatia

Besides a variety of potential applications in the field of optoelectronics, germanium (Ge) nanocrystals (NCs) are a widely-discussed alternative to poly-silicon (Si) floating gates in nonvolatile memory devices such as Flash or EEPROM, because they promise to be less sensitive to charge leakage and thus information loss. We have developed a highly scalable and cost-efficient wet-chemical sol-gel process for the synthesis of Ge NCs embedded in thin Si dioxide films. Using TEM and other techniques, we have studied these Ge NCs and find that their structural properties can be varied over a wide range by different compositions of the precursor material or different annealing conditions. In an attempt to realize non-volatile memory devices based on our sol-gel derived thin films with embedded Ge NCs, we have fabricated first MOSFET devices to characterize the charge storage behavior of these thin films involving Ge NCs as floating gate.