Light-Induced Carrier Transfer in NiSi-Nanodots/Si-Quantum-Dots Hybrid Floating Gate in Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor Structures

We have fabricated a metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) capacitor with a hybrid floating gate stack consisting of silicon quantum dots (Si-QDs) and NiSi Nanodots (NiSi-NDs) with a 3-nm-thick interlayer SiO₂, and studied the effect of 1310 nm light irradiation on charge distribution in a hybrid floating gate. The light irradiation resulted in a reduced flat-band voltage shift due to the charging of the hybrid floating gate under the application of gate biases in comparison to the shift in the dark. This result can be interpreted in terms of the shift of the charge centroid toward the gate side in the hybrid floating gate caused by the photoexcitation of electrons in NiSi-NDs and the subsequent electron tunneling to Si-QDs. When the light irradiation was turned off, the transferred charges moved back from the Si-QDs to the NiSi-NDs without being emitted to the Si substrate.