SBIR/STTR Phase I:Development of Reduced Engineering Models for Prediction of Growth of Ternary III-V Semiconductor Materials Grown by MetalOrganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I study is aimed toward development of an efficient procedure for predicting growth of ternary III-V semiconductor materials grown by Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE). These techniques are now used extensively in the semiconductor industry to model growth of materials on substrates by chemical vapor deposition. The success of such modeling depends largely on the complexity of the gas phase and surface reaction mechanisms used to predict the growth process. While multi-step finite-rate reaction mechanisms involving approximately ten to twenty species are adequate for modeling growth of binary alloys, accurate modeling of ternary alloy growth necessitates many more reactions and species. This renders the calculations for such scenarios extremely expensive and prohibitive. This technology can improve a wide variety of electronic and opto-electronic are devices. Optimization and characterization of their growth is crucial to the success of the opto-electronic and semiconductor industry. While commercial these codes have been used with great success for modeling growth of pure and binary semiconductor materials, their success has been limited (if not non-existent) for ternary materials due to the lack of knowledge of the chemistry and the extreme computational efforts required o perform such calculations.