By Jeff Dorsch

Innovations in semiconductor technology call for materials that can meet the technical challenges of advanced devices. Integrated circuits are a key part of what’s going on in mobile devices and other electronics, of course, while light-emitting diodes are also becoming critical to a wider variety of products.

“It goes back to your R&D group. If you’re not innovating, you’re dead,” says Craig Borkowski, optical segment leader for Momentive Performance Materials. “As you see, the chip sizes continue to decrease.”

Momentive offers highly thermally conductive materials used in both LED and semiconductor packaging. When it comes to LEDs, “you have to be careful in your design, to get as much brightness as possible,” Borkowski says.

“For Momentive, it’s going pretty well both on the semiconductor side and the LED side. We’re definitely seeing a recovery this year,” he adds. The company just opened a technology center in South Korea, where Borkowski is based. “We see a pretty bright future in electronics,” especially in automotive systems, he says. “It’s pretty amazing how much electronics is being stuffed into vehicles.”

LEDs are more than just blinking lights on various electronics products. They’ve been incorporated into flat-screen televisions, and “now they’re replacing incandescent light bulbs,” Borkowski notes. “We expect that area to explode as well.”

In LED and organic LED materials, Momentive’s leading competitors are Dow Chemical and the Shin-Etsu MicroSi subsidiary of Shin-Etsu Chemical, according to Borkowski. On the semiconductor packaging materials side, the company’s leading rivals are Henkel, Hitachi Chemical, and Sumitomo Chemical, he says.

Momentive was formed in the 2006 sale of General Electric Advanced Materials to Apollo Management, including the GE Bayer Silicones and GE Toshiba Silicones joint ventures. Four years later, the GE materials business was combined with Hexion Specialty Chemicals to form Momentive Performance Materials Holdings, which contains Hexion and Momentive.

Momentive last month said it was expanding its production facilities in Texas City, Texas, and Leverkusen, Germany. The Leverkusen plant makes silicones and has a technology center, along with application development centers for its customers.

Thermally conductive materials are a big deal at Element Six, a De Beers Group company formerly known as De Beers Industrial Diamonds. The sixth element, of course, is carbon, the basis for diamonds, mined or synthetic.

According to Adrian Wilson, head of the Technologies business at Element Six, the company’s synthetic diamond supermaterials can function as a heat spreader in IC packages, among other applications. In addition to the Semiconductor segment, the Technologies business also has an Optical segment, which makes synthetic diamond optical windows (or lenses) for high-power lasers, as used in extreme-ultraviolet lithography equipment and other applications. “Diamond is an excellent conductor of heat,” Wilson says. He adds, “It has five times the thermal conductivity of copper.” (That’s element 29, by the way.) “Zinc selenide will break down at high temperatures,” Wilson notes. “You don’t have that issue with diamond.”

Element Six produces its synthetic diamond supermaterials with a chemical vapor deposition process. The diamond material “enables devices at higher power densities,” Wilson says.

In May, Element Six announced its acquisition of the assets and intellectual property of Group4 Labs, a supplier of gallium nitride-on-diamond semiconductor materials for radio-frequency (RF) and high-power devices. The Group4 technology could help the company demonstrate how GaN-on-diamond could potentially be more useful and reliable than gallium nitride or silicon carbide on their own, according to Wilson. “There will be certain applications where diamond does offer the potential for more rapid adoption of these materials,” he says.

Asked how diamond supermaterials or GaN-on-diamond compares with silicon-on-sapphire technology, Wilson replies, “Generally speaking, diamond has a higher thermal conductivity than sapphire.” Silicon-on-sapphire, once confined to military/aerospace semiconductors, is becoming more widely used in high-performance RF applications.

Element Six is the biggest producer of microwave CVD diamond in the world, Wilson asserts, and the company has opened a manufacturing facility in Santa Clara, Calif. – close to Intel headquarters – in addition to its high-volume plants in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

In addition to lasers for EUV systems and semiconductor materials, Element Six is working on future applications of synthetic diamond supermaterials, both short term and long term. “We have a number of patents in the diamond development area,” Wilson notes.

When it comes to EUV lasers, “the more laser power you can generate, the better the throughput of EUV,” the Element Six executive says. “We are part of the overall supply chain for EUV manufacturers,” he adds, and that includes ASML Holding, the leading maker of EUV equipment in the world, which this year acquired its laser-source supplier, Cymer.

Diamond is also used for mounting ICs in multichip packages, Wilson says. It is “an extremely good insulator,” he comments, and its use in more common types of semiconductor packaging is rising.

Longer term, Element Six’s Optics business is working in the field of quantum encryption, a technology that is part of the process of realizing a quantum computer. “We’re working on some (U.K.) government programs on quantum repeaters,” Wilson says. Quantum encryption is relatively “close to hand” in realization, while quantum computing is further out, perhaps a decade away, he forecasts.

SEMICON West will see a program on next-generation materials presented on Tuesday afternoon, July 9, at the TechXPOT in the South Hall of Moscone Center. GlobalFoundries is sponsoring the two-hour session, which is titled, “Materials Growth Opportunities at Both Ends of the Spectrum.” The program is hosted by SEMI’s Chemical & Gas Manufacturers Group.

Dan Herr, professor and chair of the Nanoscience Department at The Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro, N.C., will open the program with his keynote address. The session will feature presentations by Richard Dixon of Intrinsiq Materials, Christophe Fitamant of Yole Développement, Paul Besser of GlobalFoundries, and Mark Thirsk of Linx Consulting.

These days, there is more to semiconductor materials than planar silicon and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor processes. SEMICON West will see a number of new developments detailed and exhibited.