Objective
The proposed project attempts to investigate routes for reducing the overall production costs by introducing novel and comparatively cheap process methods, like laser induced rapid solidification techniques, magnetron sputtering, and modified chemical vapour deposition methods.
The expected results of this project will be the development of alternative methods such as: Pulsed Laser Assisted Epitaxial Deposition (PLAED), Pulsed Laser Induced Epitaxy (PLIE), Magnetron Sputter Epitaxy (MSE), Low Energy Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition (LEPECVD) into techniques for state of the art SiGe heteroepitaxy for high speed devices, like modulation doped field effect transistors (MODFETs). Moreover the production of high quality graded SiGe buffer layers, by means of these techniques, is also expected to substantially lower the costs for the realisations not only of SiGe MODFET devices but also of Si/SiGe multiquantum wells for optical and optoelectronic applications.
Despite the first promising results, the quality of the SiGe structures realised so far with the novel methods must be further improved before attesting the suitability for electronic devices. At the moment, it is impossible to discriminate if the encountered structural problems and a sufficient control of doping profiles can be solved or whether it may represent an intrinsic limitation of the proposed novel methods.
At the end of the first phase the expected deliverables are high quality epitaxial SiGe microstructures suitable for electronic device applications with particular attention to the realisation of SiGe alloy buffer layers.
The specified criteria which the SiGe microstructures should fulfil to become candidates for device fabrication are: a low density of threading dislocations (<106 cm-2) and rather smooth surfaces (r.m.s. surface roughness smaller than 2 nm) as well as the possibility to reach a sufficiently high mobility in strained structure deposited on the top of the SiGe buffer, at first at low temperature.
During the first phase the efforts will be concentrated on the structural aspects of relaxed SiGe buffer layers and of Si and/or SiGe strained-layer obtained by the following methods: i)- Laser induced Chemical Vapour Deposition (LCVD) and subsequent pulsed (PLIE), ii)- Pulsed Laser Assisted Epitaxial Deposition (PLAED), and iii)- Radio Frequency Magnetron Sputter Epitaxy (MSE). As it concerns Low Energy Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition (LEPECVD) preliminary tests will be carried out to prove the feasibility of SiGe heteroepitaxy.
During the second phase the work will be directed to the doping problems and to the further optimisation of the SiGe microstructure vs. demonstrator device fabrication.
At the end of the second phase the project aims to deliver prototypal demonstrator devices based on the SiGe heterostructures and a prototypal plant for further industrial development, providing a favourable price to performance ratio of the devices.
Si based heterostructures like SiGe/Si offer the possibility to improve the standard SiO2 /Si device performances particularly in high frequency-low noise applications, with the additional advantage of still being compatible with the conventional mainstream Si-technology. Furthermore, SiGe microstructures can also enable the integration of optical devices (LED's and photodiodes) with silicon-based conventional integrated circuits. So far, the commonly used methods for the growth of SiGe/Si microstructure devices are based either on molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) or on ultra high vacuum chemical vapour deposition (UHV-CVD) on Si substrates. Despite the promising performance capabilities shown in particular by SiGe/Si heterobipolar transistor demonstrator devices, concerns still remain over the costs and limitations of this approach, which represent the most serious obstacle to the industrial exploitation of these novel engineered materials.
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: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering information engineering telecommunications radio technology radio frequency
- natural sciences physical sciences optics laser physics pulsed lasers
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Coordinator
00196 Roma
Italy
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.