Atomic Layer Growth Creates Silicon Chips
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Researchers at Warwick University are opting to use a new way of producing silicon-based chips to develop electronic cooling systems for spacecraft sensors. EPSRC granted  £1.7m to the University to go on with the research for further five years to manufacture the chips one layer at a time. Such technique, known as atomic layer epitaxy, allows chip makers to compound silicon with other elements such as germanium, feeding the chips new properties and function. These include modifying the chips to act as sensors, to process light signals, to collect energy or to be used in so-called spintronic computing, as well as causing components to run faster and with less power than traditional silicon ones.
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The epitaxy technique
The chips could also help to produce very effective electronic cooling systems, nicknamed as ‘cooltronics’ by the researchers. These could come handy in X-ray sensors on spacecraft or in medical devices that need to be cooled to less than 1K to operate. ‘Rather than have a big fridge that cools a whole system, you just use electronics to cool the little bit of the system that’s critical,’ project leader Prof David Leadley told #-Link-Snipped-# ‘We hope that if we get this right within this time period, we could have a device that will fly on a mission at some point.’
The thought behind 'cooltronics' is to create a system that can extract electrons from a circuit that have higher energy levels and replace them with less energetic ones, thereby lowering the temperature of the system. Cooltronic devices have antecedently been created with metal-based structures, but the Warwick team hopes that using silicon will allow the chips to be incorporated much more easily with other electronic components. The team will start out by formulating the general epitaxy technique to use it on a variety of pilot studies of silicon-based chips.
Specifically, the researchers hope to make the different layers of silicon and germanium in the chips more well defined and to prevent blurring between them. Leadley said, ‘What we are developing here is a particular lower-temperature method of doing this growth, which means that there’s less of the smearing.’ He added, "Once you get more abrupt interfaces, you can create structures that are much better controlled and then get things where you can modulate light particularly well."
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Researchers at Warwick University are opting to use a new way of producing silicon-based chips to develop electronic cooling systems for spacecraft sensors. EPSRC granted  £1.7m to the University to go on with the research for further five years to manufacture the chips one layer at a time. Such technique, known as atomic layer epitaxy, allows chip makers to compound silicon with other elements such as germanium, feeding the chips new properties and function. These include modifying the chips to act as sensors, to process light signals, to collect energy or to be used in so-called spintronic computing, as well as causing components to run faster and with less power than traditional silicon ones.
#-Link-Snipped-#
The epitaxy technique
The chips could also help to produce very effective electronic cooling systems, nicknamed as ‘cooltronics’ by the researchers. These could come handy in X-ray sensors on spacecraft or in medical devices that need to be cooled to less than 1K to operate. ‘Rather than have a big fridge that cools a whole system, you just use electronics to cool the little bit of the system that’s critical,’ project leader Prof David Leadley told #-Link-Snipped-# ‘We hope that if we get this right within this time period, we could have a device that will fly on a mission at some point.’
The thought behind 'cooltronics' is to create a system that can extract electrons from a circuit that have higher energy levels and replace them with less energetic ones, thereby lowering the temperature of the system. Cooltronic devices have antecedently been created with metal-based structures, but the Warwick team hopes that using silicon will allow the chips to be incorporated much more easily with other electronic components. The team will start out by formulating the general epitaxy technique to use it on a variety of pilot studies of silicon-based chips.
Specifically, the researchers hope to make the different layers of silicon and germanium in the chips more well defined and to prevent blurring between them. Leadley said, ‘What we are developing here is a particular lower-temperature method of doing this growth, which means that there’s less of the smearing.’ He added, "Once you get more abrupt interfaces, you can create structures that are much better controlled and then get things where you can modulate light particularly well."
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