Nanowire based imagers: Performance evaluation and fabrication

成像设备在电影制作、质量控制和侵入性/非侵入性医学等领域有着广泛的应用。制造高质量成像设备的挑战在于实现对低光强的高灵敏度、低功耗(特别是在移动应用中)和高分辨率。纳米技术为潜在地应对这些挑战提供了许多途径。这项提案深入研究了一种使用硅纳米线的途径。纳米线的基本物理原理表明，通过使它们具有成本效益，成像器性能的潜在改进和功耗的降低。硅纳米线的主要优点是：(I)与其他外来纳米材料相比，它们更容易与现有的硅基础设施集成；(Ii)它们成为直径足够小的直接带隙材料，极大地改善了硅的光吸收。拟议的工作包括开发模型来模拟现实生活中的范例，设计优化和制造，最终允许验证硅纳米线成像器。

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.