Recent study found that diamond is not only a girl's best friend, also has the characteristics of the become ideal semiconductor materials. It is good news for the electronics industry, because semiconductors for power transmission and conversion efficiency of the demand is higher and higher.
Electronics industry in the "hunger" state, always need more and more power, and almost every household appliances or other electronic devices have a power supply module to transmission, transformation, and control power. Now researchers have made important progress in single crystal diamond doping, which is the key to make diamond manufacturing electronics materials.
Diamond or become ideal semiconductor materials
"We want to make equipment to meet the requirements of our processing power." University of Wisconsin, Madison (Univerity of Wisconsin - Madison) electrical and computer engineering professor Ma Zheng strong (notes) said. Professor chan and his colleagues will be a new method of diamond doping, published in the American physical society issue of the journal applied physics.
Diamond is probably the most ideal power device of the material. Diamond thermal conductivity is very good, so the diamond material manufacturing devices coming will be very good. Traditional power device, for cooling, often will be required to have big, expensive radiator (such as heat sink or fan), using diamond material cost will reduce the heat dissipation of power devices. Diamond material is especially suitable for high voltage high power application, current in diamond material transmission faster, so using diamond material device of energy efficiency will be higher.
Diamond or become ideal semiconductor materials
But using diamond manufacturing is the biggest problem of the semiconductor doping, because of the diamond crystal structure is very neat, so doping is very difficult.
Can through the way of adding boron (boron) coating, the doped diamond heated to 1450 ¡æ. But the downside of this approach is boron doped after coating is very difficult to remove. And this method is only suitable for polycrystalline diamond, but an irregular state between the various polycrystalline diamond crystals, on the performance is better than single crystal diamond.
Traditional single crystal diamond doping method is to grow in the artificial crystal into boron atoms, this method requires a powerful microwave to injection of boron atoms, so it will only reduce the quality of crystal.
Professor chan and his colleagues found that doping methods of single crystal diamond, can be done at relatively low temperatures, and will not reduce the quality of the crystal. They found that if a single crystal diamond and boron doping the materials of semiconductor wafers are tied together, and then heated to 800 ¡æ, the boron atoms migrate from a semiconductor to diamond. Ran to the diamond, finally, because the boron atom semiconductor wafers in the hole, and the carbon atom in diamond can fill the hole.
The technology can realize the selective doping, which means that can have more control during manufacturing devices, want to doping which region, as long as the doping in the single crystal diamond can be fixed to the corresponding area.
But now the new method is only suitable for p-type doping, "we think we find a both easy and cheap, and very effective methods for diamond doping." Professor chan said, they have begun to use single crystal diamond doped p-type semiconductor to create a simple device.
But to make the transistor, the electronic device also need to be able to realize the N type doping. In addition, the single crystal diamond doping other bottlenecks, such as the diamond is very expensive, single crystal diamond size is too small.
But professor ma still think is very important to the success of p-type doped step that may inspire other researchers to solve the challenge of the rest of the single crystal diamond doping. Finally, the horse, said professor single crystal diamond is including power transmission, the perfect choice for all power applications.
