Project description
New inspection tool could help spot defects during crystal growth
Gallium nitride (GaN) is a versatile semiconductor used in various applications, including high-brightness light-emitting diodes, solar cells and high-frequency, high-power devices. Its high power density and breakdown voltage limits render the material suitable also for 5G phone base chargers. Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GaNSpector project plans to develop an automated, non-destructive inspection tool to help semiconductor manufacturers assess GaN crystal quality. Such a scanner should help identify defects during the growth process, before crystals are further processed. Moreover, it should save resources on slicing and polishing initially defective crystals, thereby reducing time and costs of fabricating epitaxy-ready wafers.
Objective
Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Silicon Carbide (SiC), in particular the 4H hexagonal polytype of SiC (4H-SiC), are wide bandgap semiconductors with significantly superior electrical and thermal characteristics compared to Silicon. Both materials are key enablers for ongoing changes in electric utility and transportation infrastructures. Commercial products that significantly benefit from GaN and SiC semiconductors include solid-state energy converters, power management electronics, power amplifiers, light-emitting diodes, displays, solar cells, lasers, and environmental sensors. Recently, the development of GaN and SiC-based devices has highly accelerated because of their potential for 5G technology. The high defectiveness of produced crystals is one of the principal obstacles to expanding GaN and 4H-SiC use. Therefore, tools for more efficient GaN and 4H-SiC production are highly requested.
The Swiss company Scientific Visual has already developed quality inspection tools for raw Sapphire industrial crystals and is expanding its technology to GaN and 4H-SiC. This project aims to develop an automated non-destructive inspection tool to help semiconductor manufacturers to get insight into raw GaN and 4H-SiC crystal quality. Such a scanner will help improving the growth process and assessing the defectiveness of GaN and 4H-SiC crystals before processing. It will save resources on slicing and polishing initially defective crystals, and thereby time and costs to fabricate epi-ready wafers.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcrystals
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networksmobile network5G
- natural scienceschemical sciencesinorganic chemistrypost-transition metals
- natural sciencesphysical scienceselectromagnetism and electronicssemiconductivity
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
1006 Lausanne
Switzerland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.