Walter Weber, the head of the Institute for Solid State Electronics, TU Wien. "Reproducibility is a big problem," says Prof. If you now want to connect a metallic contact to these components, you have a problem: Even if you try very hard to produce all these components in exactly the same way, there are still inevitably massive differences-and that makes the material complex to handle for use in the semiconductor industry. But that means that different nanoelectronic devices can have very different surface compositions and therefore different electronic properties." "In this case, there is a whole range of different oxides that can form. "With germanium, however, things are much more complicated," explains Masiar Sistani. With silicon, however, this is not a problem: silicon always forms exactly the same kind of oxide. First and foremost, it is oxygen atoms that accumulate very quickly on the surface of the materials-an oxide layer is formed. "Every semiconductor layer is automatically contaminated in conventional processes this simply cannot be prevented at the atomic level," says Masiar Sistani from the Institute for Solid State Electronics at TU Wien. This enables different interesting contact properties-especially for optoelectronic and quantum components. The team at TU Wien, however, together with research teams from Linz and Thun (Switzerland), has now shown that this problem can be solved-with contacts made of crystalline aluminum of extremely high quality and a sophisticated silicon germanium layer system. This is much more difficult with a high proportion of germanium than with silicon. The main problem here is to establish contacts between metal and semiconductor on a nanoscale in a reliable way. But there are good reasons to use higher germanium contents in the future: The compound semiconductor silicon-germanium has decisive advantages over today's silicon technology in terms of energy efficiency and achievable clock frequencies. Only in very special components a small amount of germanium is added. Current chip technology is largely based on silicon.
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