Mike Cooke

Scribe and dice

One of the most frustrating experiences in life is to almost reach the end of a long and laborious task and then some accident – due to system failure or personal stupidity – turns it all to ashes. For the semiconductor industry, “singulation”, the conversion of wafers into its separate dies, can be such an experience. The dicing process can be even more delicate with brittle materials such as gallium arsenide.

Charting the Wireless Future (part one)

Mobile phones have created new mass markets for compound semiconductors. What is the future for wireless technology? Human beings have an immense capacity to take things for granted. Things that just yesterday seemed new and exciting either become an integral part of life or are remembered with fondness or derision. Technology only continues to be successful when it looks to the future.

Excitonic prospects for UV

With the incandescent bulb beaten in terms of efficiency, and fluorescent lighting in its sights, wide bandgap semiconductors are looking for new territories to conquer. One direction to go is higher power and coherence, and blue-violet nitride-based laser diodes are now coming into commission in high-definition DVD (HD-DVD) and Blu-ray optical storage systems offering up to 25 gigabytes on a single layer. Another course is that towards shorter wavelengths – into the ultraviolet (UV).

Digital III-Vs review

With the exception of specialised applications, III-V devices have not been the first choice for logic circuits. However, growing crisis could change this. The ability to crunch digital data at ever faster rates has been steadily delivered at reasonable cost by semiconductor devices since the late 1960s. In some senses, the delivery of technological advances has been too reliable, inflating expectations and resulting in periodic booms and busts.

Silicon transistor hits 500GHz performance

Low-cost silicon germanium technology is chasing indium phosphide heterojunction bipolar transistor performance. US researchers have pushed the cut-off frequency for SiGe HBTs to 500 GHz, but this is still about 200 GHz behind the best InP result so far.

Pushing semiconductor detectors into the terahertz gap

An electromagnetic wave that penetrates clothing could be very useful in looking for concealed weapons and other objects. Terahertz waves offer such a possibility and a US university project is looking to develop a range of semiconductor detectors with spectral resolution to support such work.

Focusing on high performance and power

The US defence industry is an avid consumer of advanced electronics. A key capability is access to the electromagnetic spectrum for communications and imaging. These applications often require circuits operating at high frequency and power. BAE Systems Electronics & Integrated Solutions (E&IS) is one business based in the US that supplies into this market.

Gallium nitride futures and other stories

Gallium nitride-based devices look set to have increasingly wide application, at least if the contributions at Decembers International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2005) in Washington DC are anything to go by.

Tackling the plasma etch villains

Plasma etch is one of the most widely used processes in the semiconductor industry. It is used both for creating semiconductor structures and for developing photoresists. However, looking at some of the gases employed - such as CH4, CHF3, SF6, CF4, C2F6 - one finds a rather nasty list of global warming potential villains. Not only do these chemicals have “global warming potentials” thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide, they also have lifetimes of hundreds to tens of thousands of years ( Figure 1 , from United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ghg.unfccc.int/gwp.html ).

Looking for new solutions

Life is getting harder for the mainstream semiconductor industry based on silicon. Industry leaders like Intel are looking to III-Vs as possible staple solutions for the next decade and more. Dr Mike Cooke reports from Februarys SEMI European Industry Strategy Symposium in Berlin, Germany.