A two-step silica deposition process, including prefunctionalization with poly(vinylpyrrolidone) and the following silica deposition, has been used to fabricate silica layer on the surface of nanoscaled silver shell. The influencing parameters of silica coating process were optimized to prevent the precoated silver nanoparticles from desquamating from silica spheres, finally to obtain mono-dispersed silica spheres with silver and silica multilayer films. The resulted silica layer was dense and uniform, its thickness was controllable in the range of 20-50 nm. Such coated silica layer can provide improved thermal stability of the SiO2-Ag core-shell structural spheres. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.