Strain engineering refers to a general strategy employed in semiconductor manufacturing to enhance device performance. Performance benefits are achieved by modulating strain, as one example, in the transistor channel, which enhances electron mobility (or hole mobility) and thereby conductivity through the channel. Another example are semiconductor photocatalysts strain-engineered for more effective use of sunlight. [1]
The use of various strain engineering techniques has been reported by many prominent microprocessor manufacturers, including AMD, IBM, and Intel, primarily with regards to sub-130 nm technologies. One key consideration in using strain engineering in CMOS technologies is that PMOS and NMOS respond differently to different types of strain. Specifically, PMOS performance is best served by applying compressive strain to the channel, whereas NMOS receives benefit from tensile strain. [2] Many approaches to strain engineering induce strain locally, allowing both n-channel and p-channel strain to be modulated independently.
One prominent approach involves the use of a strain-inducing capping layer. CVD silicon nitride is a common choice for a strained capping layer, in that the magnitude and type of strain (e.g. tensile vs compressive) may be adjusted by modulating the deposition conditions, especially temperature. [3] Standard lithography patterning techniques can be used to selectively deposit strain-inducing capping layers, to deposit a compressive film over only the PMOS, for example.
Capping layers are key to the Dual Stress Liner (DSL) approach reported by IBM-AMD. In the DSL process, standard patterning and lithography techniques are used to selectively deposit a tensile silicon nitride film over the NMOS and a compressive silicon nitride film over the PMOS.[ citation needed ]
A second prominent approach involves the use of a silicon-rich solid solution, especially silicon-germanium, to modulate channel strain. One manufacturing method involves epitaxial growth of silicon on top of a relaxed silicon-germanium underlayer. Tensile strain is induced in the silicon as the lattice of the silicon layer is stretched to mimic the larger lattice constant of the underlying silicon-germanium. Conversely, compressive strain could be induced by using a solid solution with a smaller lattice constant, such as silicon-carbon. See, e.g., U.S. Patent No. 7,023,018. Another closely related method involves replacing the source and drain region of a MOSFET with silicon-germanium. [4]
Strain can be induced in thin films with either epitaxial growth, or more recently, topological growth.
Epitaxial strain in thin films generally arises due to lattice mismatch between the film and its substrate and triple junction restructuring at the surface triple junction, which arises either during film growth or due to thermal expansion mismatch. [5] Tuning this epitaxial strain can be used to moderate the properties of thin films and induce phase transitions. The misfit parameter () is given by the equation below: [6]
where is the lattice parameter of the epitaxial film and is the lattice parameter of the substrate. After some critical film thickness, it becomes energetically favorable to relieve some mismatch strain through the formation of misfit dislocations or microtwins. Misfit dislocations can be interpreted as a dangling bond at an interface between layers with different lattice constants. This critical thickness () was computed by Mathews and Blakeslee to be:
where is the length of the Burgers vector, is the Poisson ratio, is the angle between the Burgers vector and misfit dislocation line, and is the angle between the Burgers vector and the vector normal to the dislocation's glide plane. The equilibrium in-plane strain for a thin film with a thickness () that exceeds is then given by the expression:
Strain relaxation at thin film interfaces via misfit dislocation nucleation and multiplication occurs in three stages which are distinguishable based on the relaxation rate. The first stage is dominated by glide of pre-existing dislocations and is characterized by a slow relaxation rate. The second stage has a faster relaxation rate, which depends on the mechanisms for dislocation nucleation in the material. Finally, the last stage represents a saturation in strain relaxation due to strain hardening. [7]
Strain engineering has been well-studied in complex oxide systems, in which epitaxial strain can strongly influence the coupling between the spin, charge, and orbital degrees of freedom, and thereby impact the electrical and magnetic properties. Epitaxial strain has been shown to induce metal-insulator transitions and shift the Curie temperature for the antiferromagnetic-to-ferromagnetic transition in . [8] In alloy thin films, epitaxial strain has been observed to impact the spinodal instability, and therefore impact the driving force for phase separation. This is explained as a coupling between the imposed epitaxial strain and the system's composition-dependent elastic properties. [9]
Researchers more recently have achieved strain in thick oxide films larger than that achieved in epitaxial growth by incorporating nano-structured topologies (Guerra and Vezenov, 2002) [10] [11] and nanorods/nanopillars within an oxide film matrix. [12] [13] Following this work, researchers world-wide have created such self-organized, phase-separated, nanorod/nanopillar structures in numerous oxide films as reviewed here. [14] In 2008, Thulin and Guerra [15] published calculations of strain-modified anatase titania band structures, which included an indicated higher hole mobility with increasing strain. Additionally, in two dimensional materials such as WSe
2 strain has been shown to induce conversion from an indirect semiconductor to a direct semiconductor allowing a hundred-fold increase in the light emission rate. [16]
Strain engineering plays a major role in III-N LEDs, one of the most ubiquitous and efficient LED varieties that has only gained popularity after the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. Most III-N LEDs utilize a combination of GaN and InGaN, the latter being used as the quantum well region. The composition of In within the InGaN layer can be tuned to change the color of the light emitted from these LEDs. [17] However, the epilayers of the LED quantum well have inherently mismatched lattice constants, creating strain between the layers. Due to the quantum confined Stark effect (QCSE), the electron and hole wave functions are misaligned within the quantum well, resulting in a reduced overlap integral, decreased recombination probability, and increased carrier lifetime. As such, applying an external strain can negate the internal quantum well strain, reducing the carrier lifetime and making the LEDs a more attractive light source for communications and other applications requiring fast modulation speeds. [18]
With appropriate strain engineering, it is possible to grow III-N LEDs on Si substrates. This can be accomplished via strain relaxed templates, superlattices, and pseudo-substrates. [19] Furthermore, electro-plated metal substrates have also shown promise in applying an external counterbalancing strain to increase the overall LED efficiency. [20]
In addition to traditional strain engineering that takes place with III-N LEDs, Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) LEDs, which use AlN, AlGaN, and GaN, undergo a polarity switch from TE to TM at a critical Al composition within the active region. The polarity switch arises from the negative value of AlN’s crystal field splitting, which results in its valence bands switching character at this critical Al composition. Studies have established a linear relationship between this critical composition within the active layer and the Al composition used in the substrate templating region, underscoring the importance of strain engineering in the character of light emitted from DUV LEDs. [20] Furthermore, any existing lattice mismatch causes phase separation and surface roughness, in addition to creating dislocations and point defects. The former results in local current leakage while the latter enhances the nonradiative recombination process, both reducing the device's internal quantum efficiency (IQE). Active layer thickness can trigger the bending and annihilation of threading dislocations, surface roughening, phase separation, misfit dislocation formation, and point defects. All of these mechanisms compete across different thicknesses. By delaying strain accumulation to grow at a thicker epilayer before reaching the target relaxation degree, certain adverse effects can be reduced. [21]
Typically, the maximum elastic strain achievable in normal bulk materials ranges from 0.1% to 1%. This limits our ability to effectively modify material properties in a reversible and quantitative manner using strain. However, recent research on nanoscale materials has shown that the elastic strain range is much broader. Even the hardest material in nature, diamond, [22] exhibits up to 9.0% uniform elastic strain at the nanoscale. [23] Keeping in line with Moore's law, semiconductor devices are continuously shrinking in size to the nanoscale. With the concept of "smaller is stronger", [24] elastic strain engineering can be fully exploited at the nanoscale.
In nanoscale elastic strain engineering, the crystallographic direction plays a crucial role. Most materials are anisotropic, meaning their properties vary with direction. This is particularly true in elastic strain engineering, as applying strain in different crystallographic directions can have a significant impact on the material's properties. Taking diamond as an example, Density Functional Theory (DFT) simulations demonstrate distinct behaviors in the bandgap decreasing rates when strained along different directions. Straining along the <110> direction results in a higher bandgap decreasing rate, while straining along the <111> direction leads to a lower bandgap decreasing rate but a transition from an indirect to a direct bandgap. A similar indirect-direct bandgap transition can be observed in strained silicon. Theoretically, achieving this indirect-direct bandgap transition in silicon [25] requires a strain of more than 14% uniaxial strain.
In the case of elastic strain, when the limit is exceeded, plastic deformation occurs due to slip and dislocation movement in the microstructure of the material. Plastic deformation is not commonly utilized in strain engineering due to the difficulty in controlling its uniform outcome. Plastic deformation is more influenced by local distortion rather than the global stress field observed in elastic strain. However, 2D materials have a greater range of elastic strain compared to bulk materials because they lack typical plastic deformation mechanisms like slip and dislocation. Additionally, it is easier to apply strain along a specific crystallographic direction in 2D materials compared to bulk materials.
Recent research has shown significant progress in strain engineering in 2D materials through techniques such as deforming the substrate, [26] [27] inducing material rippling, [28] [29] and creating lattice asymmetry. [30] These methods of applying strain effectively enhance the electric, magnetic, thermal, and optical properties of the material. For example, in the reference [26] provided, the optical gap of monolayer and bilayer MoS2 decreases at rates of approximately 45 and 120 meV/%, respectively, under 0-2.2% uniaxial strain. Additionally, the photoluminescence intensity of monolayer MoS2 decreases at 1% strain, indicating an indirect-to-direct bandgap transition. The reference [28] also demonstrates that strain-engineered rippling in black phosphorus leads to bandgap variations between +10% and -30%. In the case of ReSe2, the literature [29] shows the formation of local wrinkle structures when the substrate is relaxed after stretching. This folding process results in a redshift in the absorption spectrum peak, leading to increased light absorption and changes in magnetic properties and bandgap. The research team also conducted I-V curve tests on the stretched samples and found that a 30% stretching resulted in lower resistance compared to the unstretched samples. However, a 50% stretching showed the opposite effect, with higher resistance compared to the unstretched samples. This behavior can be attributed to the folding of ReSe2, with the folded regions being particularly weak.
A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of a nanometre. More generally, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a thickness or diameter constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained length. At these scales, quantum mechanical effects are important—which coined the term "quantum wires".
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure.
Epitaxy refers to a type of crystal growth or material deposition in which new crystalline layers are formed with one or more well-defined orientations with respect to the crystalline seed layer. The deposited crystalline film is called an epitaxial film or epitaxial layer. The relative orientation(s) of the epitaxial layer to the seed layer is defined in terms of the orientation of the crystal lattice of each material. For most epitaxial growths, the new layer is usually crystalline and each crystallographic domain of the overlayer must have a well-defined orientation relative to the substrate crystal structure. Epitaxy can involve single-crystal structures, although grain-to-grain epitaxy has been observed in granular films. For most technological applications, single-domain epitaxy, which is the growth of an overlayer crystal with one well-defined orientation with respect to the substrate crystal, is preferred. Epitaxy can also play an important role while growing superlattice structures.
Gallium nitride is a binary III/V direct bandgap semiconductor commonly used in blue light-emitting diodes since the 1990s. The compound is a very hard material that has a Wurtzite crystal structure. Its wide band gap of 3.4 eV affords it special properties for applications in optoelectronic, high-power and high-frequency devices. For example, GaN is the substrate that makes violet (405 nm) laser diodes possible, without requiring nonlinear optical frequency doubling.
A quantum well is a potential well with only discrete energy values.
A high-electron-mobility transistor, also known as heterostructure FET (HFET) or modulation-doped FET (MODFET), is a field-effect transistor incorporating a junction between two materials with different band gaps as the channel instead of a doped region. A commonly used material combination is GaAs with AlGaAs, though there is wide variation, dependent on the application of the device. Devices incorporating more indium generally show better high-frequency performance, while in recent years, gallium nitride HEMTs have attracted attention due to their high-power performance. Like other FETs, HEMTs are used in integrated circuits as digital on-off switches. FETs can also be used as amplifiers for large amounts of current using a small voltage as a control signal. Both of these uses are made possible by the FET’s unique current–voltage characteristics. HEMT transistors are able to operate at higher frequencies than ordinary transistors, up to millimeter wave frequencies, and are used in high-frequency products such as cell phones, satellite television receivers, voltage converters, and radar equipment. They are widely used in satellite receivers, in low power amplifiers and in the defense industry.
A thin film is a layer of material ranging from fractions of a nanometer (monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films is a fundamental step in many applications. A familiar example is the household mirror, which typically has a thin metal coating on the back of a sheet of glass to form a reflective interface. The process of silvering was once commonly used to produce mirrors, while more recently the metal layer is deposited using techniques such as sputtering. Advances in thin film deposition techniques during the 20th century have enabled a wide range of technological breakthroughs in areas such as magnetic recording media, electronic semiconductor devices, integrated passive devices, LEDs, optical coatings, hard coatings on cutting tools, and for both energy generation and storage. It is also being applied to pharmaceuticals, via thin-film drug delivery. A stack of thin films is called a multilayer.
A wetting layer is an monolayer of atoms that is epitaxially grown on a flat surface. The atoms forming the wetting layer can be semimetallic elements/compounds or metallic alloys. Wetting layers form when depositing a lattice-mismatched material on a crystalline substrate. This article refers to the wetting layer connected to the growth of self-assembled quantum dots. These quantum dots form on top of the wetting layer. The wetting layer can influence the states of the quantum dot for applications in quantum information processing and quantum computation.
The heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) is a type of bipolar junction transistor (BJT) which uses differing semiconductor materials for the emitter and base regions, creating a heterojunction. The HBT improves on the BJT in that it can handle signals of very high frequencies, up to several hundred GHz. It is commonly used in modern ultrafast circuits, mostly radio frequency (RF) systems, and in applications requiring a high power efficiency, such as RF power amplifiers in cellular phones. The idea of employing a heterojunction is as old as the conventional BJT, dating back to a patent from 1951. Detailed theory of heterojunction bipolar transistor was developed by Herbert Kroemer in 1957.
Indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) is a ternary alloy of indium arsenide (InAs) and gallium arsenide (GaAs). Indium and gallium are group III elements of the periodic table while arsenic is a group V element. Alloys made of these chemical groups are referred to as "III-V" compounds. InGaAs has properties intermediate between those of GaAs and InAs. InGaAs is a room-temperature semiconductor with applications in electronics and photonics.
Indium gallium nitride is a semiconductor material made of a mix of gallium nitride (GaN) and indium nitride (InN). It is a ternary group III/group V direct bandgap semiconductor. Its bandgap can be tuned by varying the amount of indium in the alloy. InxGa1−xN has a direct bandgap span from the infrared for InN to the ultraviolet of GaN. The ratio of In/Ga is usually between 0.02/0.98 and 0.3/0.7.
A quantum dot solar cell (QDSC) is a solar cell design that uses quantum dots as the captivating photovoltaic material. It attempts to replace bulk materials such as silicon, copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) or cadmium telluride (CdTe). Quantum dots have bandgaps that are adjustable across a wide range of energy levels by changing their size. In bulk materials, the bandgap is fixed by the choice of material(s). This property makes quantum dots attractive for multi-junction solar cells, where a variety of materials are used to improve efficiency by harvesting multiple portions of the solar spectrum.
Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3, also commonly referred to as BFO in materials science) is an inorganic chemical compound with perovskite structure and one of the most promising multiferroic materials. The room-temperature phase of BiFeO3 is classed as rhombohedral belonging to the space group R3c. It is synthesized in bulk and thin film form and both its antiferromagnetic (G type ordering) Néel temperature (approximately 653 K) and ferroelectric Curie temperature are well above room temperature (approximately 1100K). Ferroelectric polarization occurs along the pseudocubic direction () with a magnitude of 90–95 μC/cm2.
Stranski–Krastanov growth is one of the three primary modes by which thin films grow epitaxially at a crystal surface or interface. Also known as 'layer-plus-island growth', the SK mode follows a two step process: initially, complete films of adsorbates, up to several monolayers thick, grow in a layer-by-layer fashion on a crystal substrate. Beyond a critical layer thickness, which depends on strain and the chemical potential of the deposited film, growth continues through the nucleation and coalescence of adsorbate 'islands'. This growth mechanism was first noted by Ivan Stranski and Lyubomir Krastanov in 1938. It wasn't until 1958 however, in a seminal work by Ernst Bauer published in Zeitschrift für Kristallographie, that the SK, Volmer–Weber, and Frank–van der Merwe mechanisms were systematically classified as the primary thin-film growth processes. Since then, SK growth has been the subject of intense investigation, not only to better understand the complex thermodynamics and kinetics at the core of thin-film formation, but also as a route to fabricating novel nanostructures for application in the microelectronics industry.
A plasmonic-enhanced solar cell, commonly referred to simply as plasmonic solar cell, is a type of solar cell that converts light into electricity with the assistance of plasmons, but where the photovoltaic effect occurs in another material.
Silicene is a two-dimensional allotrope of silicon, with a hexagonal honeycomb structure similar to that of graphene. Contrary to graphene, silicene is not flat, but has a periodically buckled topology; the coupling between layers in silicene is much stronger than in multilayered graphene; and the oxidized form of silicene, 2D silica, has a very different chemical structure from graphene oxide.
Band-gap engineering is the process of controlling or altering the band gap of a material. This is typically done to semiconductors by controlling the composition of alloys, constructing layered materials with alternating compositions, or by inducing strain either epitaxially or topologically. A band gap is the range in a solid where no electron state can exist. The band gap of insulators is much larger than in semiconductors. Conductors or metals have a much smaller or nonexistent band gap than semiconductors since the valence and conduction bands overlap. Controlling the band gap allows for the creation of desirable electrical properties.
Vladimir G. Dubrovskii is the head of Laboratory of physics of nanostructures at St. Petersburg Academic University, a leading research scientist at Ioffe Institute, and a professor at St. Petersburg State University and ITMO University.
Aristos Christou is an American engineer and scientist, academic professor and researcher. He is a Professor of Materials Science, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Reliability Engineering at the University of Maryland.