Low-temperature waste heat in the infrared (IR) wavelength region offers an opportunity to harvest power from waste energy and requires further investigation in order to find efficient conversion techniques. Although grating-coupled metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) diode devices offer efficient conversion from low and moderate-temperature thermal sources, the integration of such diodes with a nanoantenna structure has yet to be explored. We propose a bowtie nanoantenna coupled with a p-doped MOS diode for IR to direct current (DC) conversion without any bias voltage at 28.3 THz. The nanoantenna was designed and optimized to provide maximum field enhancement in a 4 nm-thick oxide layer at the resonant frequency. The device was fabricated following the complementary MOS (CMOS) fabrication process and measured in a custom DC and optical characterization setup using a 10.6 μm wavelength CO2 laser. The results reveal two different types of devices with linear and nonlinear I-V curves having kΩ and MΩ zero-bias resistance, respectively. The linear device generates a micron-level open-circuit voltage (Voc) with clear polarization dependence from the laser input, but the nonlinear case suffers from a weak noise-like signal. Finally, we analyze two types of devices using thermoelectric and tunneling effects and discuss the future direction of nanoantenna-integrated MOS devices for efficient IR harvesters.
Keywords: MOS diode; THz energy harvesting; low-temperature waste heat; plasmonic nanoantenna.