Discovery paves for quicker, cheaper semiconductor manufacture
1 min read
A new method that could make semiconductor manufacture thousands of times quicker and substantially cheaper has been developed by a team from Lund University in Sweden.
Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, the researchers made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.
Project leader Lars Samuelson believes the technology will be ready for commercialisation in two to four years' time. A prototype for solar cells is expected to be completed in two years.
Describing the method, Samuelson said: "The basic idea was to let nanoparticles of gold serve as a substrate from which the semiconductors grow. This means that the accepted concepts really were turned upside down."
The patented technology has since been refined and further studies have been conducted. In a recent article in the journal Nature, the researchers demonstrated how the growth could be controlled using temperature, time and the size of the gold nanoparticles.
"The process is not only extremely quick, it is also continuous," noted Samuelson. "Traditional manufacture of substrates is batch based and is therefore much more time consuming."
