Nanowire based imagers: Performance evaluation and fabrication

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Imaging devices have a wide variety of applications in diverse fields such as movie making, enforcing quality control and invasive/noninvasive medicine. Challenges in building high quality imaging devices are in achieving high sensitivity to low light intensities, low power consumption (especially in mobile applications) and high resolution. Nanotechnology offers many pathways to potentially address these challenges. This proposal focuses in depth on one such pathway that uses silicon nanowires. The fundamental physics of the nanowires points to a potential improvement in imager performance and a reduction in power consumption, there by making them cost effective. The major advantages with silicon nanowires are that (i) they are more easy to integrate with exisiting silicon infrastructure when compared to other exotic nanomaterials and (ii) they become a direct bandgap material at sufficiently small diameter, greatly improving light absorption of silicon. The proposed work involves developing models to simulate real life paradigms, design optimization and fabrication that ultimately permit verification of silicon nanowire imagers.