Insulating nanoporous materials are promising platforms for soft-ionizing membranes; however, improvement in fabrication processes and the quality and high breakdown resistance of the thin insulator layers are needed for high integration and performance. Here, scalable fabrication of highly porous, thin, silicon dioxide membranes with controlled thickness is demonstrated using plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor-deposition. The fabricated membranes exhibit good insulating properties with a breakdown voltage of 1 × 10(7) V/cm. Our calculations suggest that the average electric field inside a nanopore of the membranes can be as high as 1 × 10(6) V/cm; sufficient for ionization of wide range of molecules. These metal-insulator-metal nanoporous arrays are promising for applications such soft ionizing membranes for mass spectroscopy.
Keywords: dielectric breakdown; nanoporous materials; plasma-enhanced chemical-vapor-deposition; silicon dioxide; soft ionizing membrane (SIM).