News: Microelectronics
31 October 2024
DARPA awards University of Michigan’s Zetian Mi $3m to scale III–V materials on silicon
The project ‘CMOS compatible, defect-free universal growth of III–N and III–V multilayer heterostructures on Si (001)’ of Zetian Mi, professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Michigan’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been awarded $3m by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its Material Synthesis Technologies for Universal and Diverse Integration Opportunities (M-STUDIO) initiative. The goal of M-STUDIO is to “realize a universal heterogeneous integration technology, compatible with leading-edge and future advanced-node semiconductor manufacturing processes, via atomic-precision nano-scale multi-layer material synthesis”.
Picture: Zetian Mi. (Photo: Brenda Ahearn, Michigan Engineering.)
To achieve this goal, Mi and his collaborators Kai Sun (of the University of Michigan’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering) and Patrick Fay (of University of Notre Dame) will use a new method to grow ultra-thin layers of III–V compound semiconductor crystals without a foreign metal catalyst, which often introduces impurities. These tens-of-atoms thick layers will allow Mi’s team to grow the semiconductor materials on a silicon lattice without defects.
The final goal of the project will be to partner with Intelligent Epitaxy Technology Inc (IntelliEPI) of Richardson, TX, USA – which manufactures MBE-grown epitaxial wafers – to show the viability of this material at scale for use in industry.
“We must find new materials that have fundamentally better properties than silicon, as far as transistor functionality, but they need to be integrated into the current manufacturing processes,” says Mi. “It’s not likely for the industry to give up many billions of dollars of infrastructure. As such, the new material should ideally be CMOS compatible,” he adds.
“We are looking into the fundamental, long-standing challenge of integrating compound semiconductors with silicon,” says Mi. “It’s a very difficult problem, but if we are successful, there is the possibility that this material will go into every computer, every cell phone, virtually every electronic device that we use.”
