Controlling the Formation of Metallic Nanoparticles on Functionalized Silicon Surfaces

Abstract

With scaling down the size of the features in modern electronic devices, it becomes vital to control surface reactions at the interface for clean deposition on semiconductor substrates. Chemical functionalization of silicon surfaces provides a new approach for tuning the structure and properties of the interfaces formed with this semiconductor. The functionalized surfaces, such as H–Si(100), NH–Si(100), and NH2–Si(100) can be used to prevent surface oxidation at the silicon interface, and OH–Si(100) can be utilized to limit surface diffusion in a reaction with a metal–organic precursor. A model copper metal–organic precursor, copper (hexafluoroacetylacetonato)vinyltrimethylsilane or Cu(hfac)VTMS, was used to grow copper nanostructures by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), as verified by atomic force microscopy (AFM), infrared spectroscopy (MIR-FTIR), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) supported with density functional theory calculations (DFT). These methods ...