AVS 52nd International Symposium
    Electronic Materials and Processing Thursday Sessions
       Session EM1-ThA

Paper EM1-ThA10
Monomolecular Insulator Film

Thursday, November 3, 2005, 5:00 pm, Room 309

Session: Organic and Molecular Optoelectronics
Presenter: Y. Tai, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Authors: Y. Tai, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
H. Noda, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
A. Shaporenko, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
M. Grunze, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
M. Zharnikov, Universität Heidelberg, Germany
Correspondent: Click to Email
Progress in fabricating smaller and more efficient structures in electronic and spintronic devices depends on better dielectric materials for nanofabrication. A perspective nanoinsulator is a molecular thin organic film - self-assembled monolayer (SAM), which provide an alternative to commonly used oxide dielectrics such as e.g. SiO@sub 2@ or Al@sub 2@O@sub 3@. A so far unresolved technological problem for applications of SAMs in microelectronics and spintronics is the difficulty of fabricating stable metal layers on their surfaces, i.e. at the SAM-ambient interface. Such a film is generally leaky for metal adsorbates, which makes it impossible to integrate it into a multilayer assembly (e.g. in a tunnel junction magnetic memory cell) or to fabricate metal electrodes on its surface (e.g. in an organic thin film transistor). Using nickel as a test metal adsorbate and several different substituted and non-substituted SAMs as test substrates, we show that this difficulty can be overcome by the combination of a special design of the SAM constituents and their extensive cross-linking by low-energy electron irradiation. The properties of the SAM insulator and the metal overlayer were monitored by several complementary experimental techniques, including X-ray absorption spectroscopy and electrochemical measurements. The approach represents an important step toward the technological applications of monomolecular dielectric layers.