High throughput growth and characterization of thin film materials

Abstract

It usually takes more than 10 years for a new material from initial research to its first commercial application. Therefore, accelerating the pace of discovery of new materials is critical to tackling challenges in areas ranging from clean energy to national security. As discovery of new materials has not kept pace with the product design cycles in many sectors of industry, there is a pressing need to develop and utilize high throughput screening and discovery technologies for the growth and characterization of new materials. This article presents two distinctive types of high throughput thin film material growth approaches, along with a number of high throughput characterization techniques, established in the author's group. These approaches include a second-generation “discrete” combinatorial semiconductor discovery technology that enables the creation of arrays of individually separated thin film semiconductor materials of different compositions, and a “continuous” high throughput thin film material screening technology that enables the realization of ternary alloy libraries with continuously varying elemental ratios.