Effects of Hydrogen Termination on Resistivity in Nanodiamond Electronics
Authors:
- Students:
- Ellie Brandt
- Jason Cisnero
- Phoenix Fodrey
- Luciana Tapia-Gutierrez
- Teachers:
- Pamela Skoubis
- Mentors:
- Anirudha Sumant (Argonne National Laboratory, Center for Nanoscale Materials)
Center for Nanoscale Materials
Semiconductors are a class of solids with electrical conductivity levels between that of an insulator and a conductor, including both silicon and selenium. These semiconductors are important for electronic device chips, with efforts to continuously create chips with higher efficiency. However, as chips get smaller, transistors within them generate more heat in an equally small space (Perry, 2019). Furthermore, the closer the transistors become, the more difficult it is to dissipate the heat.
Diamond will play a vital role in the development of semiconductor chips. As the material with the highest thermal conductivity (CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 1991), far surpassing that of silicon, it is far more efficient and contains a high promise for future chips. However, n-type doping is difficult in diamond. H-termination of diamond surface induces two dimensional hole-gas layer on the diamond surface, which is one of the possible ways to fabricate diamond-based field effect transistors without the need for n-type doping. Chemical vapor-deposited (CVD) diamond promises to be cost-effective (Myoshi, 1999) in depositing polycrystalline diamond on wafer-scale. The hydrogen termination was employed to manipulate the electrical properties of a nanocrystalline diamond wafer, in hopes of making diamond a more efficient semiconductor.