News

16 August 2006

 

Self-calibrating metal evaporation source for MBE

RJM Semiconductor of Berkeley Heights, NJ, USA recently introduced its new InfinitiCell liquid metal evaporation source. InfinitiCell, the firm says, is the only self-calibrating metal evaporation source for use in Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) and related vacuum metal deposition techniques.

InfinitiCell uses a large capacity cylinder and piston metal pump to feed liquid metal into the thermal evaporator, and a level sensor probe in the evaporator is used to set and control the liquid metal height. Experimental measurements on the InfinitiCell show that the metal beam flux can be reproducibly set and controlled with an accuracy of ±0.1%, says the firm. In addition, the low thermal mass of the evaporator allows rapid modulation of the metal beam flux with temperature ramp rates of up to ±20C/min.

Roger Malik, RJM Semiconductor’s president, said: “The stability of the metal beam fluxes is very important since they directly control the growth rates and alloy compositions of the deposited films. All other metal thermal evaporators exhibit decreasing evaporation rates at a fixed temperature due to source depletion effects thus requiring frequent recalibrations of the evaporator temperature to maintain a constant metal flux”.

According to the firm, the rapid thermal response of the InfinitiCell also allows precision alloy grading and can be used to idle the metal sources at lower temperatures between growth runs to conserve source material.

Contact Roger Malik: rjm@rjmsemi.com

Visit: http://www.rjmsemi.com