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In recent years, plasma enhanced atomic layer deposition (PEALD) has emerged as a key method for the growth of conformal and homogeneous aluminum nitride (AlN) films at the nanoscale. In this work, the utilized PEALD reactor was equipped not only with a traditional remote Inductively Coupled Plasma source but also with an innovative additional power supply connected to the substrate holder. Thus, we investigate here the substrate biasing effect on AlN film quality deposited on (100) silicon. We report that by adjusting the ion energy via substrate biasing, the AlN film quality can be significantly improved. Indeed, compared to films commonly deposited without bias, AlN deposited with a platen power of 5 W displays a 14% increase in the number of N–Al bonds according to X-ray spectroscopy analysis. Moreover, after having integrated them into Metal–AlN–Si capacitors, the 5 W AlN film exhibits a permittivity increase from 4.5 to 7.0 along with a drastic drop of leakage current density of more than 5 orders of magnitude. The use of substrate biasing during PEALD is thereby a promising strategy for the improvement of AlN film quality.

The fast and direct detection of small quantities of biological and chemical species is of key importance for numerous biomedical applications. Extensive research has been conducted on nanoelectronic devices that can perform such detection with high sensitivity using silicon nanowires and nanostructures. However, it was recently demonstrated that Si material suffers a lack of long-term stability in physiological environments at nanometer scale [1,2], and is hence not suited for in situ sensing of biological molecules. The results presented here are two important steps toward the realization of core-shell Si-SiC NWFETs for the detection of biomolecules in liquid media. First, we show that SiC NWs exhibit higher chemical stability than Si NWs under physiological conditions. Second, we present the successful carburation of a thin film of Si resulting in a 3.6 nm thin SiC layer.