SiGe and stress technology for next generations of high performance electronic and photonic devices

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For decades, the silicon (Si) based semiconductor industry has been crucial to drawing the broad outlines of the modern history of economics and technology. In the past decade, however, the ever increasing demands on performance enhancement have pushed Si to its physical limits. The introduction of silicon germanium (SiGe) and stress to previously unstrained Si devices is promising to solve this dilemma, which boost device performance significantly while taking advantage of the existing large scale Si manufacture infrastructure. Moreover, Si and Ge based photonic devices hold the potential to improve the speed of on-chip data transmission and long distance communications by orders of magnitudes. Despite its rapid development in the last decade, the application of SiGe and stress technology brings integration challenges such as SiGe interdiffusion, dopant diffusion and activation, stress distribution and relaxation. These issues degrade device performance and make the product development process complicated, time-consuming and costly. The proposed research is to address these challenges.