Journal
NANO LETTERS
Volume 13, Issue 6, Pages 2748-2753Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/nl400949n
Keywords
Nickel silicide; silicon nanowire; defects; twin boundary; heterogeneous nucleation; in situ TEM
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy [DE-AC52-06NA25396]
- University of California San Diego
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At the nanoscale, defects can significantly impact phase transformation processes and change materials properties. The material nickel silicide has been the industry standard electrical contact of silicon microelectronics for decades and is a rich platform for scientific innovation at the conjunction of materials and electronics. Its formation in nanoscale silicon devices that employ high levels of strain, intentional, and unintentional twins or grain boundaries can be dramatically different from the commonly conceived bulk processes. Here, using in situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), we capture single events during heterogeneous nucleation and atomic layer reaction of nickel silicide at various crystalline boundaries in Si nanochannels for the first time. We show through systematic experiments and analytical modeling that unlike other typical face-centered cubic materials such as copper or silicon the twin defects in NiSi2 have high interfacial energies. We observe that these twin defects dramatically change the behavior of new phase nucleation and can have direct implications for ultrascaled devices that are prone to defects or may utilize them to improve device performance.
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