Crystalline Si has enjoyed spectacular success in the solar cell industry for various reasons including the ability to benefit from technological breakthroughs in the microelectronics industry and the close proximity of the 1.1 eV band gap value of Si to the optimal theoretical 1.3 eV band gap value for which the thermodynamically limited single-cell...

Alternatives to silicon dioxide and silicon nitride, the traditional dielectric and passivation materials in semiconductor devices, have been the subject of intense research for the past two decades. Alloy compounds whose properties can be tuned via compositional adjustments are of particular interest. These include materials such as silicon oxynitride....

Semiconductors have revolutionized the world of electronics and are found in practically every electronic device currently used. One of the aspects of semiconductor materials that make them so useful is that the behavior of a semiconductor can be easily manipulated through doping. However, with current methods of developing the dopant (SiH3)3P hydride,...

The application of silicon photonic technologies to optical telecommunications requires the development of near-infrared detectors monolithically integrated to the Si platform. Most present approaches require the bonding of the semiconductor detector material to the silicon circuitry, which can be time consuming and expensive. While approaches to...

Employing selective epitaxy to grow fully strained Si-Ge alloys in the source and drain (S/D) of a p-type metal-oxide semiconductor (PMOS) transistor compresses the Si-channel to significantly increase the hole mobility, and consequently, the speed of the device. Ge-rich alloys, where Ge constitutes = 50% of the alloy, are of particular interest...

Germanium (Ge) has a direct band gap (E0) of 0.81 eV at room temperature; however, applying small perturbations to Ge can shift E0 to lower energies resulting in dramatically improved performance for semiconductor and telecommunication applications. Stressing Ge using tensile strain provides one means by which to lower its E0, but the current best...

Current commercial and defense electronics are based on Silicon (Si) while most RF and optical sources and detectors are based on III-V and II-VI semiconductors grown on non-Si substrates such as GaAs, InP, InAs, GaSb, and CdZnTe. This partitioning of the substrates poses major obstacles to device integration and restricts the choice of material...

The ability to manufacture high quality Sn-Ge and Si-Ge-Sn alloys has significant industry value for various reasons; however, existing techniques have failed to produce sufficiently high quality alloys to allow for effective use of these alloys in device applications. Specifically, the ability of Sn-Ge alloys to transition from indirect- to direct-gap...

The advent of epitaxial techniques for growing thin films has allowed for the growth of unnatural, metastable structures having properties previously unattainable in equilibrium systems. Specifically, quaternary compounds are of great interest for microelectronic and optoelectronic devices due to expectations that these materials will exhibit the...