Mode Shift of a Thin-Film F-P Cavity Grown with ICPCVD

Abstract

Industrial-grade optical semiconductor films have attracted considerable research interest because of their potential for wafer-scale mass deposition and direct integration with other optoelectronic wafers. The development of optical thin-film processes that are compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes will be beneficial for the improvement of chip integration. In this study, a multilayer periodically structured optical film containing Fabry–Perot cavity was designed, utilizing nine pairs of SiN/SiO2 dielectrics. Subsequently, the multilayer films were deposited on Si substrates through the inductively coupled plasma chemical vapor deposition (ICPCVD) technique, maintaining a low temperature of 80 °C. The prepared films exhibit narrow bandpass characteristics with a maximum peak transmittance of 76% at 690 nm. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) shows that the film structure has good periodicity. In addition, when the optical films are exposed to p/s polarized light at different angles of incidence, the cavity mode of the film undergoes a blueshift, which greatly affects the color appearance of the film. As the temperature rises, the cavity mode undergoes a gradual redshift, while the full width at half maximum (FWHM) and quality factor remain relatively constant.

Keywords

• Fabry–Perot cavity
• inductively coupled plasma chemical vapor deposition
• low temperature
• cavity mode