Tom Thieme
Director Marketing and Sales, LayTec AG

Biography

Tom Thieme graduated from the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (Germany) in process and environmental engineering. Thereafter, 15 years as a professional in the global electronic and semiconductor industry gave him a distinguished experience in semiconductor related product support, marketing and sales.

Initially, as global product manager of TOTAL’s special chemical division, he approached the Asian silicon memory and CMOS semiconductor industry. This gave him a strong technical background on metal deposition processes for silicon and compound semiconductor application and wafer level packaging technologies. Since 2010 Tom is with LayTec and contributed very successfully to LayTec’s extraordinary success in the Greater China’s LED industry. As business development manager he helped our customers take full advantage of LayTec’s in-situ metrology products for compound semiconductor MOVPE processes. Based on his profound understanding of both, compound semiconductor customer needs and technology of integrated metrology he efficiently communicates the requests of our customers in the field back to LayTec’s R&D and application engineering teams. Since 2012 Tom is General Sales Manager of LayTec’s compound semiconductor division and since 2013 director marketing and sales.

Abstract

GaAs and GaN based device optimization by advanced epitaxial growth analysis
Semiconductor manufacturing is a battle for perfection, which not only includes the maximization of the device performance and lifetime. It is as well the ongoing search and innovation for new technologies, especially in our communicating environment.

GaN RF power transistors (e.g. HEMTs) based on AlGaN/GaN or InAlN/GaN device structures are an excellent approach for the next generation of RF and power electronics, due to their combination of high electron mobility and high critical electric field strength. Their nearly three orders of magnitude lower specific on-resistance (theoretical value) compared to silicon based devices could enable an at least 10-fold reduction of power losses, device size and cost.

Unfortunately, concerning the substrates used in the production process, there is a conflict between cost and performance. Typically, the best performance is reached on semi-insulating silicon carbide, but the use of large diameter silicon substrates opens an additional way for further cost reduction in the production process. In recent years significant efforts were necessary to develop a strain engineering technology for GaN-on-Si and GaN-on-SiC devices grown by Metalorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE).

In this presentation we will show that in-situ metrology, especially the precise control of the wafer surface temperature, strain status of the layer as well as the in-situ analysis of important structural characteristics, can be directly correlated with key performance parameters of such devices. Industrial examples of state-of-the art GaAs based pHEMT structures, as well as the GaN based devises, will be shown as reference.