A breakthrough in the manufacturing of insulation and semiconductor materials is expected to keep the nation at the forefront of IC chip fabrication, a team of researchers from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) said yesterday.
The team was led by NCTU electron physics professor Chang Wen-hao (張文豪) and TSMC technology director Li Lain-jong (李連忠), previously a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences.
The semiconductor industry has almost reached the limit of how small transistors can be, prompting researchers to search for new materials and fabrication methods, Chang told a news conference at the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taipei.
While 2D semiconductors — which have a thickness of only 0.7 nanometers, or one atom — can overcome the bottleneck caused by shrinking transistors, how to insulate them from adjacent materials is a crucial issue to solve, Chang said.
Boron nitride is the thinnest known insulator, but existing techniques cannot produce single-crystal boron nitride of sufficient high quality for wafer-scale applications, he said.
However, the team identified a way to synthesize one-atom-thick boron nitride on a wafer and demonstrated its efficiency in improving the performance of transistors made of 2D semiconductors, he said.
The key was their discovery of the underlying physics that permits boron nitride to be synthesized in single-crystal forms on a 2-inch copper wafer and then transferred to a 4-inch silicon wafer, he said.
The copper wafer is a transition material, he added.
His lab has been experimenting with growing boron nitride on copper foils for years, while Li advised the team in conducting the experiment on a wafer, Chang said.
Their paper, titled “Wafer-scale single-crystal hexagonal boron nitride monolayers on Cu (111),” was published in the scientific journal Nature on March 4.
TSMC researcher Chen Tse-an (陳則安) was listed as the paper’s lead author for making the crucial discovery about the synthesis of boron nitride.
They cannot estimate when the technique might become commercially viable, as there are still materials issues to resolve, but boron nitride is a refractory material that deserves more research, Li said.
Among the paper’s coauthors are academics from Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who only helped characterize the team’s sample materials, Li said in response to media queries.
The ministry supported the team through its Taiwan Consortium of Emergent Crystalline Materials program, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Shieh Dar-bin (謝達斌) said.
The NCTU-TSMC research team has set an “outstanding example of academic-industrial collaboration,” Shieh added.
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