Introduction
The NMRC was founded in 1981. It currently employs over 200 technical
staff and has capital assets in excess of £30m. NMRC offers
a full range of services to industry and is involved in leading
edge electronics research with several major multinational electronics
companies including IC Process, Packaging Devices and basic Materials
Research.
In the III-V ("Three Five") group we work mostly with
those compound semiconductors such as indium phosphide (InP) in
which one of the elements (In) is from group III of the periodic
table of the elements, and the other (P) is from group 5. These
semiconductors are characterised by their high electrical conductivity,
by their ability to produce light efficiently, and by their ability
to function at high speed in microwave equipment or in fast computers.
We have dedicated laboratories for the growth, processing and
testing of III-V devices.
We support our R&D activities by a mixture of state-supported
research and development grants, industrially-sponsored development
projects, and commercial sales of microwave and optoelectronic
devices which we have developed in-house.
The Acting Head of the III-V activities is
Dr. Gabriel Crean.
III-V Laboratory
The NMRC's III-V Laboratory has its own fabrication
equipment suitable for producing devices and small scale circuits
and has been making Schottky devices since 1974. It contains all
of the facilities required to manufacture III-V Schottky diodes,
from design through epitaxial growth, processing and testing.
The III-V materials growth laboratory contains an MOCVD epitaxial
reactor and associated facilities such as diagnostic equipment
and a preparation laboratory. The processing capabilities currently
include SiO2 sputtering, thermal annealing, planar plasma etching
of SiO2, RIE of GaAs and SiO2,
plasma etching of photoresist,
thermal metallic evaporation and electron beam evaporation.
There is a dedicated clean room including normal optical lithographic
equipment based around a Karl Suss contact mask aligner. In addition
an EBL system is available with about 0.2µm resolution as
well as a DUV (220nm) Karl Suss aligner.
The wafer laboratory includes grinding, polishing, electroplating,
scribing and dicing stations. The test laboratory includes surface
profiling, residual gas analysis, carrier concentration profiling,
DC profiling, and RF(4GHz) noise measurement.
Research Areas
Our main strengths are in the following three areas:
Growth of Epitaxial Wafers
We have complete MOVPE facilities for the growth and characterisation
of state-of-the-art epitaxial wafers, with one machine dedicated
to growth on GaAs substrates, and another dedicated to InP substrates.
Fabrication of Laser Diodes and Light-Emitting-Diodes
We have several projects directed towards the development of novel
laser diode structures for improving the performance of high power
multimode 808nm and 980nm lasers and for improving the characteristics
of ridge lasers at similar wavelenghts.
Fabrication of Schottky Diode Chips
In addition to very interesting research work in Schottky diode
chips for high frequency radiometric applications, and high power
Schottky structures for power supplies, we offer a complete commercial
service for the design, fabrication and supply of Schottky chips
to the mm/submm community.
