Band Engineering for Electronic Devices, by Dr. Maher Tahhan

11am in ITE 336

Semiconductor technology is in an era of advances with new and unique materials. While silicon dominates the market for consumer computation, larger bandgap materials are better suited for other applications, in particular for light emission, handling high power, and operating in extreme environments. Gallium nitride, GaN, along with other III-nitride crystals, have shown their higher breakdown and thermal stability are incredibly useful for pushing the boundaries of how much power transistors can handle. But it is the III-nitride crystal’s polarization that makes it really shine, giving us a large design space to perform energy band engineering.

Engineering the energy band profile of a device can provide quantum confinement of electrons to prevent leakage and increase gain, or to shape a barrier to allow for increased tunneling current. With the recent initiatives to develop ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors such as diamond and aluminum nitride, band engineering is a powerful tool to overcome the challenges that comes with working with these semiconductors. Beyond just their design comes the challenge of fabricating and evaluating devices using these emerging materials. As such, fabrication process development and advanced measurement techniques are crucial to demonstrating how far we can push electronics today.

Maher Tahhan is an Electrical Engineer at Raytheon working on RF and ultrawide bandgap devices. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He focuses on wide bandgap and ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor device design and fabrication, with applications in power electronics, communication, sensing, and computing.

For more information, contact: Brandy Ciraldo at brandy.ciraldo@uconn.edu