news digest ♦ Equipment and Materials
Riber has announced a major order for the modernisation of the fleet of R&D and pilot production MBE systems used by GIE III-V Lab, the joint Alcatel-Lucent, Thales and CEA-Leti industrial research laboratory.
This order, included in the backlog at December 31st, 2013, concerns the full refurbishment of a production system.
More specifically, its modernisation will help increase the Riber’s customer’s production capacity for optoelectronic and microelectronic components destined to the telecommunications and defence industries, while significantly extending the system’s lifetime.
This is Riber’s biggest system upgrade project to-date, covering all functions and components of an MBE production system.
This order confirms Riber’s customer service strategy with the strengthening of its technical and commercial organisation, and the development of standard products for the upgrading of the installed production system base.
The mission of III-V Lab is to perform research and development on III-V semiconductor components, from basic research to product development, taking advantage of the commonalities between the technologies developed for different markets addressed by Thales and Alcatel-Lucent, such as telecom, space, defence and security.
III-V Lab has also the capacity to produce and sell components (epitaxial wafers, processed wafers, modules) in small to medium quantities; this is one of its main business development axis.
Such capacity is particularly adapted to address in a flexible way the rapid evolution of the market, allowing partner companies (modules or systems manufacturers, including of course the mother companies Alcatel-Lucent and Thales) to have an early access to the components; in a second step, depending on the market evolution, if larger quantities are required, the technology will be transferred to a partner company with larger production capacities.
Improving microscopy on the atomic scale
TEM is very useful for observing dislocations and measuring layer thicknesses in semiconductors
When capturing images at the atomic scale, even tiny movements of the sample can result in skewed or
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www.compoundsemiconductor.net January / February 2014
The new technique effectively eliminates distortion from nanoscale images as shown in the image above
At issue are scanning transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), which can capture images of a material’s individual atoms. To take those images, scientists have to allow a probe to scan across the sample area - which has an area of less than twenty five nanometres squared. That scanning can take tens of seconds.
The sample rests on a support rod, and while the scanning takes place the rod expands or contracts due to subtle changes in ambient temperature. The rod’s expansion or contraction is imperceptible to the naked eye, but because the sample area is measured in nanometres the rod’s movement causes the sample material to shift slightly. This so-called “drift” can cause the resulting scanning TEM images to be significantly distorted.
“But our approach effectively eliminates the effect of drift on scanning TEM images,” says James LeBeau, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper describing the work.
Researchers programmed the microscope to rotate the direction in which it scans the sample. For example, it might first take an image scanning from left to right, then take one scanning from top to bottom, then right to left, then bottom to top. Each scanning direction captures the distortion caused by drift from a different vantage point.
The researchers plug those images into a program they developed that measures the features in each image and uses that data to determine the precise direction and extent of drift within the sample. Once the drift is quantified, the images can be adjusted to remove the distortion caused by the drift.
distorted images - and those movements are virtually impossible to prevent.
Now microscopy researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that accounts for that movement and eliminates the distortion from the finished product.
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