Electrochemical Atomic Layer Deposition (EC-ALD) Low Cost Synthesis of Engineered Materials a Short Review

Abstract

Sonia D Kumar and S Ahmad

Having mastered the technology of epitaxial deposition of crystalline thin films (i.e. homo and heteroepitaxy) on crystalline substrates has already been found providing better device designs with numerous advantages in the development of microelectronics devices and circuits. Consequently, mass-scale production of epitaxial thin films could successfully be developed and used in fabricating discrete devices and integrated circuits (ICs) using silicon/compound semiconductors commercially. Especially, realizing the hetero-epitaxial interfaces possessing two-dimensional electron/hole gas (2DEG/2DHG) sheets could offer very-high electron/hole mobilities for producing high-electronmobility transistors (HEMTs) and amplifiers for microwave/millimeter-wave communication systems. However, the major limitation of this technology was its requirement of extremely high cost infrastructures. Subsequently, the rising demands of the technologies to produce large-size displays/electronics systems, and large-numbers of sensors/ actuators in Internet of Thing (IoT) made it imminent for the researchers to explore replacing the existing cost intensive technologies by more affordable ones. In such an endeavor, developing a simpler and alternate epitaxial technology became imminent to look for. Incidentally, electrodeposition based epitaxy attracted the attention of the researchers by employing potentiostatic set-up for understanding the growth kinetics of the ionic species involved. While going through these studies, starting with the deposition of metallic/semiconducting thin films, atomic-layer epitaxial depositions could be successfully made and named as electrochemical atomic layer deposition (EC-ALD). Despite numerous attempts made for almost two decades in this fascinating field the related technology is not yet ready for its commercial exploitations. Some of the salient features of this process (i.e. commonly known as EC-ALD or EC-ALE) are examined here with recent results along with future prospects.

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