Semiconductor Manufacturing Research News
The ability to strain silicon has proved crucial to the semiconductor industry. Now, a team of university researchers claim they have developed techniques which may lead to the ability to control the strain of graphene.
A suspended graphene membrane on a copper mesh. (Source: University of Arkansas)
They studied sheets of carbon one-atom thick, suspended over the tops of squares of copper. By changing the voltage at the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope as it moves up and down, the researchers caused the freestanding graphene membrane to change shape and create strain, thereby changing its “pseudo-magnetic” and electronics properties.
The researchers hail from the University of Arkansas, Nanjing University, École Centrale Paris, Quingdao University and Missouri State University. They published their results in the journal Physical Review.
Titanium Nitride Shows Plasmonics Promise
The field of plasmonics is becoming increasingly important to optics researchers, and Purdue University researchers said they have found that titanium nitride could perform well as a plasmonic material in the visible and near-infrared regions.
(Source: Purdue University)
While gold and silver are known plasmonic materials, they do not easily fit in with conventional silicon processing. Titanium nitride could serve as an alternative plasmonic material with improved optical properties, easier fabrication and integration capabilities over silver and gold. Using molecular beam epitaxy, the researchers created a thin lattice of titanium nitride over sapphire to measure its plasmonic capabilities.
In an abstract of the published work, Purdue’s Alexandra Boltasseva said titanium nitride could provide performance that is “comparable to that of gold for plasmonic applications and can significantly outperform gold and silver for transformation-optics.” The discovery “could ultimately lead to real-life applications for plasmonics and metamaterials.”
DARPA Launching Program for Heterogeneous Integration
The Department of Defense’s (DOD) Advanced Research Project Agency is launching a program to develop foundry-compatible processors using heterogeneous integration processes, allowing diverse material systems and device technologies to be tightly integrated on a common silicon substrate.
DARPA’s Diverse Accessible Heterogeneous Integration (DAHI) program will spend $80- $100 million with three technical areas of interest: DAHI process development, foundry establishment, and circuit design innovation, said a notice about the program posted on FedBizOpps.gov.
“Enabling the ability to ‘mix and match’ a wide variety of devices and materials on a common silicon substrate would allow circuit designers to select the best device for each function within their designs,” said Thomas Lee, office director of DARPA’s microsystems technology office
Proposals are due July 9, DARPA said, adding that the DAHI program “aims to establish a manufacturable foundry technology to provide accessibility to a broad community of designers for innovative circuit or microsystem designs.”
– by David Lammers
Tags: DARPA, graphene, heterogeneous CMOS, Plasmonics, Purdue, University of Arkansas