Executive Summary : | The semiconductor industry has followed Moore's law and is approaching the limit where further miniaturization to obtain high component density causes a reliability issue due to the fact that size would be too small to overlook quantum effects and a consequence high power dissipation occurs in Si based devices. The industry is, therefore, looking towards to oxide systems as they exhibit a broad range of interesting properties in material system, viz.ferromagnetic (FM), ferroelectric (FE), piezoelectric (PE),etc. and above all couplings between these properties can provide truly multifunctional low power novel electronic devices. Therefore, devices made up of such materials can perform more than one task at the same time and facilitate device miniaturization and that has recently attracted considerable interest due to additional degrees of freedom into the existing semiconductor technology for new memory and information storage concepts. In this context, Ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs) are attaining increasing attention due to the possibility of realizing ultra- fast, high density non-volatile memory. To realize this, high quality ultra-thin multilayer deposition of ferroelectric and metallic sandwich structures will be established by a cost-effective and compact multi-target prototype sputter deposition tool. Ultimate goal is to transfer the technology based on the result obtained from the lab-scale sputtering tool to the industrial scale production of multicomponent, multilayer nanoelectronic thin films and heterostructures for novel electronic devices. However, the transfer require process control regarding the film growth as well as steps to minimize adverse interaction between different layers, as multilayer deposition is realized one after the other in the same chamber with the multi-target assembly of selected material systems. In order to establish a control technique that can possibly be integrated as a toolbox for the RF-magnetron sputter deposition system, we will investigate the potential of optical spectroscopy techniques including Raman scattering and Tip Enhanced Raman Scattering to monitor the properties of the material. The specialists in thin film growth of metallic, superconducting, dielectric, ferroelectrics, multiferroics materials and instrumentation combines all the necessary expertise to realize the targeted goal in this three-year project.
During the course of the project, graduate/undergraduate students will get the state-of the-art training in the above exciting area of science and engineering. The proposed project provides better opportunities to choose material science and nanoelectronic as their career choice; and contribute to the national growth by contributing significantly to the economic development. We also plan to introduce a new course on the "Nanoelectronic for Information Storage" at the graduate level and this project will be a seed to realize that goal here in the LPU. |