Peripheral Nanostructured Porous Silicon Boosts Static and Dynamic Performance of Integrated Electronic Devices

Nanomaterials hold the promise of revolutionizing electronics and, in turn, its applications, thanks to the unique properties of charge carriers traveling in structures with length scale down to a few nanometers. Here, the tremendous reduction of mobility and lifetime of charge carriers when traveling in randomly arranged nanostructured silicon crystallites, namely, nanostructured porous silicon (n-PSi), is leveraged to simultaneously improve the turn-off switching speed and reverse operation voltage of solid-state devices integrated nearby. As a proof-of-concept application, it is shown that the integration of peripheral n-PSi next to solid-state diodes fabricated by an industrial process, namely, PSi-nanostructured diodes, reliably improves both the breakdown voltage (>2× increase) and switching time (30% reduction), with respect to those of reference diodes without n-PSi, with no significant drawbacks on other diode parameters. This effect is shown to be robust with respect to n-PSi preparation conditions and diode architectures, thus paving a new way toward groundbreaking n-PSi applications in microelectronics.