Tag Archives: letter-pulse-tech

Osram Opto Semiconductors today presented the latest generation of surface-mountable LED, the Topled E1608, with a package smaller than its predecessor models by a factor of 20. Despite this considerable miniaturization, the low-power LED is bright, reliable and robust, offering greater options and design flexibility, particularly for car interior applications.

ThinGaN, thin film and Sapphire – the new Topled E1608 LEDs from Osram Opto Semiconductors are based on the latest chip technologies. In combination with the latest high-efficiency converters, the low-power LEDs produce outstanding performance values. At a normal operating current of 20 mA, the new Topleds are 3.6 times brighter than preceding models. The converted pure green version, for example, achieves the impressive and unprecedented value of 780 mcd at 10 mA. For the package, Osram uses tried and tested pre-mold technology, but reduced in size compared to the previous version. The E1608 in the name refers to the more compact package dimensions of 1.6 mm x 0.8 mm compared to the standard Topled measuring 3.2 mm x 2.8 mm. At 0.6 mm, the E1608 height is also considerably less than the previous height of 1.9 mm.

Due to the new package dimensions, the E1608 can now be used for more compact customer systems.

“The new Topled E1608 LEDs are some of the smallest LEDs in their class, offering reliability, a wide selection of colors and impressive performance values,” said Michael Godwin, Director, World Wide Interior Automotive Products, Osram Opto Semiconductors. “In addition, they are suitable for all customer requirements – whether the application is toward the top or bottom of the brightness range. We anticipate they will become firmly established in the market and may eventually define a new industry standard. These robust LEDs are suitable particularly for the automotive sector for applications such as displays, ambient lighting and backlighting of switches and instruments.”

Osram’s next-gen Topled will be available in numerous colors – from yellow and orange to super red, white, pure green and true green as part of the current market launch, expected to be the first of an entire series throughout the remainder of 2017.

OSRAM-TOPLED-20E-product

Imagine wearing a device that continuously analyzes your sweat or blood for different types of biomarkers, such as proteins that show you may have breast cancer or lung cancer.

Rutgers engineers have invented biosensor technology – known as a lab on a chip – that could be used in hand-held or wearable devices to monitor your health and exposure to dangerous bacteria, viruses and pollutants.

An artists' rendition of microparticles flowing through a channel and passing through electric fields, where they are detected electronically and barcode-scanned. Credit: Ella Marushchenko and Alexander Tokarev/Ella Maru Studios

An artists’ rendition of microparticles flowing through a channel and passing through electric fields, where they are detected electronically and barcode-scanned. Credit: Ella Marushchenko and Alexander Tokarev/Ella Maru Studios

“This is really important in the context of personalized medicine or personalized health monitoring,” said Mehdi Javanmard, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Our technology enables true labs on chips. We’re talking about platforms the size of a USB flash drive or something that can be integrated onto an Apple Watch, for example, or a Fitbit.”

A study describing the invention was recently highlighted on the cover of Lab on a Chip, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The technology, which involves electronically barcoding microparticles, giving them a bar code that identifies them, could be used to test for health and disease indicators, bacteria and viruses, along with air and other contaminants, said Javanmard, senior author of the study.

In recent decades, research on biomarkers – indicators of health and disease such as proteins or DNA molecules – has revealed the complex nature of the molecular mechanisms behind human disease. That has heightened the importance of testing bodily fluids for numerous biomarkers simultaneously, the study says.

“One biomarker is often insufficient to pinpoint a specific disease because of the heterogeneous nature of various types of diseases, such as heart disease, cancer and inflammatory disease,” said Javanmard, who works in the School of Engineering. “To get an accurate diagnosis and accurate management of various health conditions, you need to be able to analyze multiple biomarkers at the same time.”

Well-known biomarkers include the prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a protein generated by prostate gland cells. Men with prostate cancer often have elevated PSA levels, according to the National Cancer Institute. The human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone, another common biomarker, is measured in home pregnancy test kits.

Bulky optical instruments are the state-of-the-art technology for detecting and measuring biomarkers, but they’re too big to wear or add to a portable device, Javanmard said.

Electronic detection of microparticles allows for ultra-compact instruments needed for wearable devices. The Rutgers researchers’ technique for barcoding particles is, for the first time, fully electronic. That allows biosensors to be shrunken to the size of a wearable band or a micro-chip, the study says.

The technology is greater than 95 percent accurate in identifying biomarkers and fine-tuning is underway to make it 100 percent accurate, he said. Javanmard’s team is also working on portable detection of microrganisms, including disease-causing bacteria and viruses.

“Imagine a small tool that could analyze a swab sample of what’s on the doorknob of a bathroom or front door and detect influenza or a wide array of other virus particles,” he said. “Imagine ordering a salad at a restaurant and testing it for E. coli or Salmonella bacteria.”

That kind of tool could be commercially available within about two years, and health monitoring and diagnostic tools could be available within about five years, Javanmard said.

A multi-institutional team led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discovered a way to create new alloys that could form the basis of next-generation semiconductors.

Semiconductor alloys already exist-often made from a combination of materials with similar atomic arrangements-but until now researchers believed it was unrealistic to make alloys of certain constituents.

“Maybe in the past scientists looked at two materials and said I can’t mix those two. What we’re saying is think again,” said Aaron Holder, a former NREL post-doctoral researcher and now research faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder. Holder is corresponding author of a new paper in Science Advances titled Novel phase diagram behavior and materials design in heterostructural semiconductor alloys. “There is a way to do it.”

Scientists connected to the Center for Next Generation of Materials by Design (CNGMD) made the breakthrough and took the idea from theory to reality. An Energy Frontier Research Center, which is supported by the Energy Department’s Office of Science and researchers from NREL, the Colorado School of Mines, Harvard University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

“It’s a really nice example of what happens when you bring different institutions with different capabilities together,” said Holder. His co-authors from NREL are Stephan Lany, Sebastian Siol, Paul Ndione, Haowei Peng, William Tumas, John Perkins, David Ginley, and Andriy Zakutayev.

A mismatch between atomic arrangements previously thwarted the creation of certain alloys. Researchers with CNGMD were able to create an alloy of manganese oxide (MnO) and zinc oxide (ZnO), even though their atomic structures are very different. The new alloy will absorb a significant fraction of natural sunlight, although separately neither MnO nor ZnO can. “It’s a very rewarding kind of research when you work as a team, predict a material computationally, and make it happen in the lab,” Lany said.

Using heat, blending a small percent of MnO with ZnO already is possible, but reaching a 1:1 mix would require temperatures far greater than 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), and the materials would separate again as they cool.

The scientists, who also created an alloy of tin sulfide and calcium sulfide, deposited these alloys as thin films using pulsed laser deposition and magnetron sputtering. Neither method required such high temperatures. “We show that commercial thin film deposition methods can be used to fabricate heterostructural alloys, opening a path to their use in real-world semiconductor applications,” co-author Zakutayev said.

The research yielded a first look at the phase diagram for heterostructural alloys, revealing a predictive route for properties of other alloys along with a large area of metastability that keeps the elements combined. “The alloy persists across this entire space even though thermodynamically it should phase separate and decompose,” Holder said.

The State University of New York ranked 38th in the “Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted U.S. Utility Patents for 2016,” according to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), which publishes the ranking annually based on U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data.

SUNY campuses were awarded 57 U.S. utility patents for advances in biotechnology, cancer research, manufacturing, renewable energy, and much more.

“Across SUNY, our faculty and students partner to make groundbreaking discoveries in a broad spectrum of areas,” said SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher. “Through more than 1,300 U.S. patents earned to date, SUNY research has led to hundreds of new technologies and advances that address society’s greatest challenges and have a positive impact on quality of life in New York and beyond. Congratulations to all those at SUNY whose important work has elevated us to this prominent world ranking.”

“This recognition marks a terrific accomplishment for our growing number of SUNY research faculty, who work tirelessly to mentor students while engaging them in research opportunities that advance the frontiers of knowledge and address state and global challenges,” said SUNY Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, and NAI Fellow, Alexander N. Cartwright. “Our faculty, a number of whom are NAI members, are a tremendous source of pride for SUNY.”

“From energy, to medicine, to consumer technologies and more, innovation is at an all-time high throughout New York State, and SUNY is at the center of it,” said SUNY Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Grace Wang. “With a multitude of influential research institutions, supported by the largest, most comprehensive university-connected research foundation in the country, SUNY is driving positive change across the globe.”

Research at SUNY produces more than 100 new technologies every year. SUNY inventors have contributed to some of the most transformative technologies in history, including the heart-lung machine, bar code scanner, MRI, and several FDA-approved therapeutics. Some recent SUNY innovations include:

University at Albany is helping law enforcement fight crime by using scattered light to perform microscopic analysis of biological and chemical samples, an approach that allows investigators to immediately confirm the source of biological stains found at crime scenes.

Binghamton University may one day cut air conditioning costs dramatically by creating light-filtering dyes that, when applied to glass, block heat while letting light pass through.

University at Buffalo is testing a reengineered hormonal treatment for diabetes and obesity. Telemedicine will be used to link children and their families to treatment they would otherwise only have access to in a local office or school.

SUNY Downstate Medical Center is working toward a lower-power, more stable alternative to implantable cardioverter defibrillators to re-start the heart. The technology re-purposes a nerve stimulator to use the body’s own nervous system to control the heart.

SUNY-ESF researchers have developed a “Trojan Horse” to attack cancer cells using special polymers that trick cancer cells into directly ingesting chemotherapeutic drugs so they are destroyed from the inside out, thus reducing damage to normal cells.

Upstate Medical University is advancing concussion assessment through a new set of cognitive tests that will help doctors and clinicians properly diagnose and manage concussions.

SUNY College at Optometry researchers have suggested that targeting a cell’s communication channels or gap junction could slow the progress of glaucoma.

SUNY Polytechnic Institute researchers invented a nanoscale scaffold that mimics the human eye which can help test possible glaucoma drugs and other therapeutics.

Stony Brook University redesigned a catheter that incorporates LED lights to reduce the likelihood of infection after the device is inserted into a patient’s body.

Some problems are so challenging to solve that even the most advanced computers need weeks, not seconds, to process them.

Now a team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Notre Dame has created a new computing system that aims to tackle one of computing’s hardest problems in a fraction of the time.

“We wanted to find a way to solve a problem without using the normal binary representations that have been the backbone of computing for decades,” said Arijit Raychowdhury, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Their new system employs a network of electronic oscillators to solve graph coloring tasks – a type of problem that tends to choke modern computers.

Details of the study were published April 19 in the journal Scientific Reports.  The research was conducted with support from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Center for Low Energy Systems Technology.

“Applications today are demanding faster and faster computers to help solve challenges like resource allocation, machine learning and protein structure analysis – problems which at their core are closely related to graph coloring,” Raychowdhury said. “But for the most part, we’ve reached the limitations of modern digital computer processors. Some of these problems that are so computationally difficult to perform, it could take a computer several weeks to solve.”

A graph coloring problem starts with a graph – a visual representation of a set of objects connected in some way. To solve the problem, each object must be assigned a color, but two objects directly connected cannot share the same color. Typically, the goal is to color all objects in the graph using the smallest number of different colors.

In designing a system different from traditional transistor-based computing, the researchers took their cues from the human brain, where processing is handled collectively, such as a neural oscillatory network, rather than with a central processor.

“It’s the notion that there is tremendous power in collective computing,” said Suman Datta, Chang Family professor in Notre Dame’s College of Engineering and one of the study’s co-authors. “In natural forms of computing, dynamical systems with complex interdependencies evolve rapidly and solve complex sets of equations in a massively parallel fashion.”

The electronic oscillators, fabricated from vanadium dioxide, were found to have a natural ability that could be harnessed for graph coloring problems. When a group of oscillators were electrically connected via capacitive links, they automatically synchronized to the same frequency – oscillating at the same rate. Meanwhile, oscillators directly connected to one another would operate at different phases within the same frequency, and oscillators in the same group but not directly connected would sync in both frequency and phase.

“If you suppose that each phase represents a different color, this system was essentially mimicking naturally the solution to a graph coloring problem,” said Raychowdhury, who is also the ON Semiconductor Junior Professor at Georgia Tech.

The researchers were able to create a small network of oscillators to solve graph coloring problems with the same number of objects, which are also referred to as nodes or vertices. But even more significant, the new system theoretically proved that a connection existed between graph coloring and the natural dynamics of coupled oscillatory systems.

“This is a critical step because we can prove why this is happening and that it covers all possible instances of graphs,” Raychowdhury said. “This opens up a new way of performative computation and constructing novel computational models. This is novel in that it’s a physics-based computing approach, but it also presents tantalizing opportunities for building other customized analog systems for solving hard problems efficiently.”

That could be valuable to a range of companies looking for computers to help optimize their resources, such as a power utility wanting to maximize efficiency and usage of a vast electrical grid under certain constraints.

“This work provides one of the first constructive ways to build continuous time dynamical system solvers for a combinatorial optimization problem with a working demonstration using compact scalable post-CMOS devices,” said Abhinav Parihar, a Georgia Tech student who worked on the project.

The next step would be building a larger network of oscillators that could handle graph coloring problems with more objects at play.

“Our goal is to reach a system with hundreds of oscillators, which would put us in striking distance of developing a computing substrate that could solve graph coloring problems whose optimal solutions are not yet known to mankind,” Datta said.

CITATION: Abhinav Parihar, Nikhil Shukla, Matthew Jerry, Suman Datta and Arijit Raychowdhury, “Vertex coloring of graphs via phase dynamics of coupled oscillatory networks,” (Scientific Reports, April 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00825-1

 SiTime Corporation, a developer of MEMS-based timing solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of MegaChips Corporation (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 6875), today introduced the SiT1569 oscillator and SiT1576 Super-TCXO with expanded frequency range. These timing solutions, available in a tiny CSP (chip-scale package), enable coin-cell battery operated IoT sensors to run up to 10 years. By using SiTime’s revolutionary TempFlat MEMS and mixed-signal technology, these devices deliver increased timekeeping accuracy and system power savings. The ultra-reliable, low-jitter SiT1576 and SiT1569 reference clocks are designed to drive microcontrollers (MCUs) and analog front end (AFE) modules in a range of portable and IoT applications such as railroad activity sensors in harsh environments, seismic sensor interface applications, and personal medical diagnostics.

“SiTime’s unique timing solutions are solving the most difficult design challenges. Smaller size, long battery life, and timing accuracy are becoming increasingly important with the rapid growth of IoT,” said Piyush Sevalia, executive vice president of marketing at SiTime. “The SiT1569 oscillator and SiT1576 Super-TCXO offer the best size, power, and accuracy to enable new IoT applications.”

About the SiT1569 Oscillator and SiT1576 Super-TCXO
These MEMS timing solutions enable unprecedented size reduction and battery life by replacing bulky quartz oscillators that have limited frequency options, or internally-generated (MCU) power-hungry frequencies that lack accuracy and consume I/O pins.

Key specifications:

  • Smallest package, CSP-4, up to 80% smaller than quartz solutions
    • 1.5 mm x 0.8 mm (1.2mm2 footprint)
    • 0.60 mm height for lower profile
  • Power supply current
    • 2.5 µA (100 kHz, SiT1569)
    • 5.5 µA (100 kHz, SiT1576)
  • Frequency range (factory programmed for fast delivery)
    • 1 Hz to 2 MHz (SiT1576)
    • 1 Hz to 462 kHz (SiT1569)
  • All-inclusive frequency stability includes initial offset and variations over industrial temperature (-40 to +85°C); a more accurate clock enables better timekeeping and extends battery life
    • ±5 ppm (SiT1576)
    • ±50 ppm (SiT1569)
  • Excellent jitter performance
    • 2.2 ns RMS period jitter (100 kHz, SiT1576)
    • 4.0 ns RMS period jitter (100 kHz, SiT1569)
  • Up to 65% faster startup time
    • 300 milliseconds (max.)
  • Highest reliability and resilience; MEMS resonator mass is 500 to 1000 times smaller than quartz
    • 30 times higher shock and vibration resistance
    • 30 times higher reliability, at 1 billion hours MTBF

Samples of the SiT1576 Super-TCXO and SiT1569 oscillator are available now from SiTime for qualified customers. Production volume is planned for Q3 2017.

Zhe Fei pointed to the bright and dark vertical lines running across his computer screen. This nano-image, he explained, shows the waves associated with a half-light, half-matter quasiparticle moving inside a semiconductor.

“These are waves just like water waves,” said Fei, an Iowa State University assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. “It’s like dropping a rock on the surface of water and seeing waves. But these waves are exciton-polaritons.”

This image shows how researchers launched and studied half-light, half-matter quasiparticles called exciton-polaritons. A laser from the top left shines on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a flat semiconductor. The red circles inside the semiconductor are the waves associated with the quasiparticles. Image courtesy of Zhe Fei/Iowa State University

This image shows how researchers launched and studied half-light, half-matter quasiparticles called exciton-polaritons. A laser from the top left shines on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a flat semiconductor. The red circles inside the semiconductor are the waves associated with the quasiparticles. Image courtesy of Zhe Fei/Iowa State University

Exciton-polaritons are a combination of light and matter. Like all quasiparticles, they’re created within a solid and have physical properties such as energy and momentum. In this study, they were launched by shining a laser on the sharp tip of a nano-imaging system aimed at a thin flake of molybdenum diselenide (MoSe2), a layered semiconductor that supports excitons.

Excitons can form when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. When excitons couple strongly with photons, they create exciton-polaritons.

It’s the first time researchers have made real-space images of exciton-polaritons. Fei said past research projects have used spectroscopic studies to record exciton-polaritons as resonance peaks or dips in optical spectra. Until recent years, most studies have only observed the quasiparticles at extremely cold temperatures – down to about -450 degrees Fahrenheit.

But Fei and his research group worked at room temperature with the scanning near-field optical microscope in his campus lab to take nano-optical images of the quasiparticles.

“We are the first to show a picture of these quasiparticles and how they propagate, interfere and emit,” Fei said.

The researchers, for example, measured a propagation length of more than 12 microns – 12 millionths of a meter – for the exciton-polaritons at room temperature.

Fei said the creation of exciton-polaritons at room temperature and their propagation characteristics are significant for developing future applications for the quasiparticles. One day they could even be used to build nanophotonic circuits to replace electronic circuits for nanoscale energy or information transfer.

Fei said nanophotonic circuits with their large bandwidth could be up to 1 million times faster than current electrical circuits.

A research team led by Fei recently reported its findings in the scientific journal Nature Photonics. The paper’s first author is Fengrui Hu, an Iowa State postdoctoral research associate in physics and astronomy. Additional co-authors are Yilong Luan, an Iowa State doctoral student in physics and astronomy; Marie Scott, a recently graduated undergraduate at the University of Washington; Jiaqiang Yan and David Mandrus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee; and Xiaodong Xu of the University of Washington.

The researchers’ work was supported by funds from Iowa State and the Ames Laboratory to launch Fei’s research program. The W.M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles also partially supported the nano-optical imaging for the project.

The researchers also learned that by changing the thickness of the MoSe2 semiconductor, they could manipulate the properties of the exciton-polaritons.

Fei, who has been studying quasiparticles in graphene and other 2-D materials since his graduate school days at University of California San Diego, said his earlier work opened the doors for studies of exciton-polaritons.

“We need to explore further the physics of exciton-polaritons and how these quasiparticles can be manipulated,” he said.

That could lead to new devices such as polariton transistors, Fei said. And that could one day lead to breakthroughs in photonic and quantum technologies.

UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country’s researchers have explored superelasticity properties on a nanometric scale based on shearing an alloy’s pillars down to nanometric size. In the article published by the prestigious scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers have found that below one micron in diameter the material behaves differently and requires much higher stress for it to be deformed. This superelastic behaviour is opening up new channels in the application of microsystems involving flexible electronics and microsystems that can be implanted into the human body.

Superelasticity is a physical property by which it is possible to deform a material to a considerable extent, up to 10%, which is much higher than that of elasticity. So when stress is applied to a straight rod, the rod can form a U-shape and when the stress applied is removed, the rod fully regains its original shape. Although this has been amply proven in macroscopic materials, “until now no one had been able to explore these superelasticity properties in micrometric and nanometric sizes,” explained José María San Juan, lead researcher of the article published by Nature Nanotechnology and a UPV/EHU professor.

Researchers in the UPV/EHU’s Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Applied Physics II have managed to see that “the superelastic effect is maintained in really small devices in a copper-aluminium-nickel alloy”. It is an alloy with shape memory on which the research team has been working for over 20 years on a macroscopic level: Cu-14Al-4Ni, an alloy that displays superelasticity in ambient temperature.

Pillars were built using the Cu-Al-Ni alloy, each one with a diameter measuring about 500 nm (half a micrometre). Credit: José María San Juan / UPV/EHU

Pillars were built using the Cu-Al-Ni alloy, each one with a diameter measuring about 500 nm (half a micrometre). Credit: José María San Juan / UPV/EHU

By using a piece of equipment known as a Focused Ion Beam, “an ion cannon that acts as a kind of atomic knife that shears the material”, explained San Juan, they built micropillars and nanopillars of this alloy with diameters ranging between 2 μm and 260 nm –a micrometre is one millionth of a metre and a nanometre one thousand-millionth of a metre–. And to them they applied a stress using a sophisticated instrument known as a nanoindenter, which “allows extremely small forces to be applied,” and then they measured their behaviour.

The researchers have for the first time confirmed and quantified that in diameters of less than a micrometre there is a considerable change in the properties relating to the critical stress for superelasticity. “The material starts to behave differently and needs a much higher stress for this to take place. The alloy continues to display superelasticity but for much higher stresses”. San Juan highlights the novelty of this increase in critical stress linked to size, and also stresses that they have been able to explain the reason for this change in behaviour: “We have proposed an atomic model that allows one to understand why and how the atomic structure of these pillars changes when a stress is applied”.

Microsystems involving flexible electronics and devices that can be implanted in the human body

The UPV/EHU professor highlighted the importance of this discovery, “spectacular superelastic behaviour on a small scale”, which opens up new channels in the design of strategies for applying alloys with shape memory to develop flexible microsystems and electromechanical nanosystems. “Flexible electronics is very much present on today’s market, it is being increasingly used in garments, sports footwear, in various displays, etc.” He also affirmed that all this is of crucial importance in developing smart healthcare devices of the Lab-on-a-chip type that can be implanted into the human body. “It will be possible to build tiny micropumps or microactuators that can be implanted on a chip, and which will allow a substance to be released and regulated inside the human body for a range of medical treatments.”

It is a discovery that “is expected to have great scientific and technological repercussions and offer the potential to revolutionise various aspects in related fields,” concluded San Juan, and he welcomed the fact that “we have managed to transfer all the necessary knowledge and to acquire the working tools that the most advanced centres can avail themselves of to open up a new line of research which can be fully developed at the UPV/EHU”.

At this week’s 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, imec, a research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technology, reported record breaking values below 10^-9 Ohm.cm² for PMOS source/drain contact resistivity. These results were obtained through shallow Gallium implantation on p-SiliconGermanium (p-SiGe) source/drain contacts with subsequent pulsed nanosecond laser anneal.

In future N7/N5 nodes, the source/drain contact area of the transistors becomes so small that the contact resistance threatens to become the dominating parasitic factor, resulting in suboptimal transistor functioning. Researchers have therefore been working on techniques to reduce the contact resistance on highly doped n-Si and p-SiGe source/drain contacts, aiming for values below 10^-9 Ohm.cm². Together with colleagues from the KU Leuven (Belgium), Fudan University (Shanghai, China), and Applied Materials (Sunnyvale, USA), imec’s specialists concentrated on p-SiGe contacts, comparing the effects of high-dose Boron and Gallium doping.

For the comparison, the researchers implanted SiGe separate wafers with a high dose of Gallium or Boron and applied various anneal processes. They then fabricated multi-ring circular transmission line model structures, which are highly sensitive to contact resistance. Subsequent measurements revealed the lowest contact resistance for the Gallium-implanted structures annealed with Applied Material’s nanosecond laser anneal. This process uniquely causes a Ge/Ga surface segregation, which is responsible for the ultralow sub-10^-9 Ohm.cm² contact resistivity. This result show a possible way to process next-generation technology nodes.

Naoto Horiguchi, distinguished member of the technical staff at imec indicated: “This breakthrough achievement in our search to develop solutions for next generation deeply-scaled CMOS provides a possible path for further performance improvement using the current source/drain schemes in N7/N5 nodes.”

Imec’s research into advanced logic scaling is performed in cooperation with imec’s key partners in its core CMOS programs including GlobalFoundries, Huawei, Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Hynix, Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC.

imec tin

Imec, a research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technology, announced today at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits the world’s first demonstration of a vertically stacked ferroelectric Al doped HfO2 device for NAND applications. Using a new material and a novel architecture, imec has created a non-volatile memory concept with attractive characteristics for power consumption, switching speed, scalability and retention. The achievement shows that ferro-electric memory is a highly promising technology at various points in the memory hierarchy, and as a new technology for storage class memory. Imec will further develop the concept in collaboration with the world’s leading producers of memory ICs.

Ferro-electric materials consist of crystals that exhibit spontaneous polarization; they can be in one of two states, which can be reversed with a suitable electric field. This non-volatile characteristic resembles ferromagnetism, after which they have been named. Discovered more than five decades ago, ferro-electric memory has always been considered ideal, due to its very low power needs, non-volatile character and high switching speed. However, issues with the complex materials, the breakdown of the interfacial layer and bad retention characteristics have presented significant challenges. The recent discovery of a ferro-electric phase in HfO2, a well-known and less complex material, has triggered a renewed interest in this memory concept.

“With HfO2, there is now a material with which we can process ferro-electric memories that are fully CMOS compatible. This allows us to make a ferro-electric FET (FeFET) in both planar and vertical varieties,” noted Jan Van Houdt, imec’s chief scientist for memory technology. “We are working to overcome some of the remaining issues, such as retention, precise doping techniques and interface properties, in order to stabilize the ferro-electric phase. We are now confident that our FeFET concept has all the required characteristics. It is, in fact, suitable for both stand-alone and embedded memories at various points in the memory hierarchy, going all the way from non-volatile DRAM to Flash-like memories. It has particularly interesting characteristics for future storage-class memory, which will help overcome the current bottleneck caused by the differences in speed between fast processors and slower mass memory.”

Imec recently presented the first, extremely positive results to its partners. The research center is now offering further development and industrialization of the vertical FeFET as a program to all its memory partners, which include the world’s major companies producing memory ICs.

“FeFETs can be used as a technology to build memory very similar to Flash-memory, but with additional advantages for further scaling, simplified processing, and power consumption,” added Van Houdt. “With our longstanding R&D and processing experience on advanced Flash, we are uniquely positioned to offer our partners a head start in this exciting opportunity. They can then decide how best to fit ferro-electric memories in their products and chips.”

Imec’s research into advanced memory is performed in cooperation with imec’s key partners in its core CMOS programs including GlobalFoundries, Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, Samsung, SK Hynix, Sony Semiconductor Solutions, Toshiba, Sandisk and TSMC.

imec ferroelectric