This award from the Division of Materials Research and the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the development of a new reactor for enabling the synthesis of new materials for technologies in solid state lighting, power electronic systems, and laser technologies. This equipment will be used to grow new materials under extreme conditions such as high pressure, new elements integration, and integration of highly dissimilar materials. One PhD student and a postdoctoral fellow will contribute to designing, building, and optimizing the reactor and its relevant processes for producing these new materials of unconventional III-nitride semiconductors and oxynitride materials. Such new materials will have impacts on developing device technologies with applications in energy efficiency and renewable energy, smart vehicle and power delivery systems, optical communications, and internet-of-things. This new reactor design will also be scalable for future technology transfer, if proven successful. The project will support the training of next generation of instrument scientists.
This award from the Division of Materials Research and the Major Research Instrumentation program supports the development of a novel chemical vapor phase (CVD) reactor for enabling the exploration of high indium content III-nitride alloys and oxynitrides, which require high pressures (< 100 atm) to prevent decomposition of the nitride, and their device applications. Two key elements, spatial separation of source material/ precursors and high reactor pressures, will be combined in a novel high pressure spatial CVD (HPS-CVD). A (< 2 inch diameter) wafer is continuously rotated through multiple different source chambers leading to mixing of the desired precursors in the user controlled boundary layer thickness (< 1 mm) preventing pre-reactions and reducing diffusion distances. Such a reactor currently does not exist and its development will enable progress in (epitaxial) growth of hard to synthesize functional materials due to decomposition limitations ultimately enabling novel device designs and exploring new science. The equipment being developed will integrate well with the existing eco systems based on a closed-loop and integrated approach for addressing basic science and applied material research needs in the III-nitride semiconductors beyond conventional material systems and oxynitrides. Specifically, the materials enabled by this equipment include: high indium content AlInN/AlInGaN/BInGaN-based heterostructores and growth, dilute-anion impurity III-Nitride alloys and heterostructures, rare-earth doped III-nitride alloys, along with functional oxynitrides. The concept of HPS-CVD can be expanded beyond III-Nitride and oxynitride materials, and it is expected this concept will be extended for material integration in the future.
