Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Materials for Electronic and Photonic Applications

Dr. Tom Oder

Youngstown State University

 

Abstract

Semiconductor materials have played a huge role in advancing today's technology through the electronic and photonic devices ushered in over the years. Since about 1990s, wide bandgap compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) were the focus of research and development to complement and sometimes replace devices based on silicon (Si), germanium (Ge) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) materials. This rapid development was driven in part by society's growing needs for devices to handle higher power, higher temperature and higher frequency. Current research efforts are expanding to ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors such as AlGaN, diamond, BN, Ga2O3 and oxide-based materials. In this talk, I will present the results from our work including improvement of SiC Schottky barrier diodes for high temperature and high-power electronic applications. The Schottky diodes were fabricated using a variety of rectifying contacts including refractory metal diborides, Ni, Ti and Mo. I will also present results from our work on Ga2O3, where we investigated the microstructure and optical properties of the thin films deposited and processed under various conditions. The overall goal of our work is to realize the unique advantages expected from the theoretically predicted properties of these ultra-wide bandgap semiconductor materials.

 

Speaker Biography

Dr. Oder obtained his BS degree from Makerere University, Uganda and an MS degree in radiation physics from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK. He completed his PhD degree in Physics at Auburn University, Alabama. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Kansas State University under the supervision of Profs Jingyu Lin and Hongxing Jiang from 1999-2003. Since 2003, Dr. Oder has been a member of the faculty in Physics at Youngstown State University where he is now a tenured full professor. Between August 2019 and August 2022, Dr. Oder served as Program Director of the Condensed Matter Physics program at the National Science Foundation. He has received several awards including Distinguished Professorship from Youngstown State University, Fulbright Scholarship, IAEA Scholarship, 3 US patents, several research grants, and has published over 35 research papers in refereed journals. His research interest is on fundamental materials physics and devices based on wide bandgap semiconductors.