14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), which is jointly operated by the University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently developed a new method of decontaminating semiconductor materials. The achievement is very important, considering that even the minutest traces of foreign materials inside this class of materials can result in malfunctions of the electronic devices they are built into.
The new clean-up method is the equivalent of a “fine-toothed comb,” the creators of the new method believe. They say that substances which do not belong in semiconducting chemicals can easily ruin electronic equipment and chips, especially if these tools are very small. Given that the predominant trend in the electronics industry today is miniaturization, the JILA accomplishment comes not a moment too soon.
The group focused its attention on arsine gas, a compound used to make a variety of photonics devices. Colleagues from the Longmont, Colorado-based Matheson Tri-Gas also participated in the investigation. Details of their conclusions are published in a paper entitled “Analysis of Trace Impurities in Semiconductor Gas via Cavity-Enhanced Direct Frequency Comb Spectroscopy,” which appears in the July 20 online issue of the esteemed scientific journal Applied Physics B. The JILA team named its new cleaning method cavity-enhanced direct frequency comb spectroscopy (CE-DFCS).
The physicists say that the novel technique is capable of providing speed, sensitivity, specificity and broad frequency coverage at the same time. The main component is an advanced optical frequency comb. The device is capable of producing light of different colors, which can then be used to accurately analyze the quantity, structure and dynamics of various atoms and molecules in a target sample. Given that semiconducting materials need to be as close to pure as possible before they exit the factory, employing CE-DFCS as a final control measure should weed out all batches of material that are contaminated following the production process.