THE NATURES OF POINT DEFECTS IN AMORPHOUS SILICON DIOXIDE

Amorphous silicon dioxide (a-SiO2) plays a central role in many of today’s technologies, including fiber optics for communications and satellite data bus applications, as the gate and field oxides in 90% of all contemporary metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices (e.g., computer chips), as windows, photomasks, and transmissive optics for ultravioletlaser microchip lithography, and as thin films for highly reflective (or highly transmissive) coatings for laser optics. Point defects in aSiO2 introduced in the manufacturing process or induced by ionizing or particle irradiations (including ultraviolet photons) can degrade the otherwise excellent properties of this material, potentially leading to device failure in the field. In principal, a single fundamental defect type, or class of defects, may at the same time cause massive attenuation in optical fibers and lead to equally fatal threshold voltage shifts in MOS transistors. It is easy to imagine how improvements in identification and control of these defects could result in billions of dollars in cost savings to photonics and semiconductor industries over the next decade.

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