New nanostructure synthesis process set to boost solar cell efficiency
From www.nanowerk.com
2011-10-03 07:00:00
Excerpt:
In our present nanomanufacturing process known as Simultaneous Plasma-Enhanced Reactive Ion Synthesis and Etching (SPERISE), we have integrated both nanoscale bottom-up synthetic and top-down etching approach. This eliminates the expensive prepatterning steps and hence give rise to ultrahigh throughput, better reliability, high yield and above all, low cost. Since, this process does not need any prepatterning steps, it is now possible to combine nanostructures on any microstructures, which is the holy-grail of the nanomanufacturing process.
The findings have been reported in the September 21, 2011 online edition of ACS Nano (“Ultrahigh Throughput Silicon Nanomanufacturing by Simultaneous Reactive Ion Synthesis and Etching”).
Although it is known to researchers for a long time about how to make nanostructures over a large area, little was known about the mechanism of such synthesis. This was a barrier for controllable and deterministic nanofabrication process. In this paper, we have presented experimental evidence of the nanoscale synthesis process elucidating the mechanism of formation of nanostructures. The mechanism has been successfully applied to explain the nanostructure formation in variety of crystallographic silicon substrate such as single-crystal, poly-crystal and amorphous silicon as well as differently doped (p- or n-type) substrates. We believe, the proposed mechanism will provide a general guideline to design new SPERISE methods for other solid-state materials besides silicon.
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