2009 R&D 100 Winner
Single crystal silicon is the standard material for prevailing chipsets, but NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., has developed a semiconductor material for ultra-fast microelectronic applications that carries charge mobility to a new level while at the same time revealing an entirely new bandgap engineering technology. Rhombohedral Lattice-Matched SiGe achieved mobility higher than 2,000 cm2/V s. The team who developed it hopes to see further growth in charge mobility to higher than 3,000 cm2/V s. A new material growth technology, super-hetero-epitaxy, was possible through new x-ray diffraction methods developed at NASA, including total defect density measurement and spatial wafer mapping method. This work was the basis for the new engineering model for the third bandgap.
Technology
Semiconductor material
Developer
NASA Langley Research Center
