Milestone-Proposal:Molecular Beam Epitaxy

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Docket #:2024-14

This proposal has been submitted for review.

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To the proposer’s knowledge, is this achievement subject to litigation? No

Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes

Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s designated fields as defined by IEEE Bylaw I-104.11, namely: Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy. Yes

Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes

Was it of at least regional importance? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes

Has the IEEE Section(s) in which the plaque(s) will be located agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes

Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes

Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an IEEE Milestone? Yes

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Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:

1968-1970

Title of the proposed milestone:

Molecular Beam Epitaxy, 1968–1970

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance; if personal name(s) are included, such name(s) must follow the achievement itself in the citation wording: Text absolutely limited by plaque dimensions to 70 words; 60 is preferable for aesthetic reasons.

In 1968–1970, Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) techniques using reflection high-energy electron diffraction for growing epitaxial compound semiconductor films were introduced. MBE deposits single crystal structures one atomic layer at a time, creating materials that cannot be duplicated through other known techniques. This precise crystal growth method revolutionized the fabrication of semiconductor devices, quantum structures, and electronic devices, including lasers for reading and writing optical disc media.

200-250 word abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed, the person(s) involved, historical context, humanitarian and social impact, as well as any possible controversies the advocate might need to review.

As it was righteously written by W. Patrick McRay, from UCSB in 2007, if ‘’MBE deserves a place in the history books’’, Al Cho, the well-recognized ‘’father of Molecular Beam Epitaxy’’ should also be appointed to the Pantheon of science. Indeed, without MBE and all associated discoveries in physics of semiconductor science, research may not have move forward at such a pace, nor the industry would have been in a position to develop tools with mass production output and yield capabilities. From the small pieces of substrates onto which Al Cho have originally grown the first Quantum Cascade Lasers in a home-made reactor at Bell Labs with Federico Capasso in 1970, to the current multi-150 mm, multi-200 mm up to single 300 mm and 450 mm tools, five decades have passed. Al Cho has enabled a company like RIBER, with whom he has closely collaborated for years, to strive and develop MBE all over the world at industrial level. In 1978 the first International Conference on Molecular Beam Epitaxy took place in Paris, during which Al Cho was conference chair. Since 2004 an award in his name is presented every 2 years, the ‘’Al Cho MBE award’ to scientists who have made fundamental contributions to the science and technology of MBE.  It is key to highlight that MBE is THE tool that has enabled Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui (Bell Labs) to share their 1998 Nobel prize (with Robert Laughlin) in 1998. Out of Bell Labs, MBE has contributed the shared Nobel Prize of Herbert Kroemer, Zhores Alferov and Jack Kilby in 2000. Al Cho is already the recipient of many accolades: the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1994, the Elliot Cresson Medal in 1995, the National Medal of Technology in 2007. He is also in the National Inventor Hall of Fame and he received the National Medal of Science in 1993 from Bill Clinton, President of the United States in 1993, which is the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement. For his lifelong contribution in science of MBE and above, Al Cho deserves another accolade from his pairs.

IEEE technical societies and technical councils within whose fields of interest the Milestone proposal resides.

Solid-State Circuits, Photonics, Communications

In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?

North Jersey

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):

Unit: North Jersey Section
Senior Officer Name: Emad Farag

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:

Unit: North Jersey Section
Senior Officer Name: Emad Farag

IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):

IEEE Section: North Jersey
IEEE Section Chair name: Emad Farag

Milestone proposer(s):

Proposer name: Theodore Sizer
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Proposer name: Arnaud Wilk
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Proposer name: Jean Decobert
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.

Street address(es) and GPS coordinates in decimal form of the intended milestone plaque site(s):

600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 40.684031, -74.401783

Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.

Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need. Intention is to have the plaque just outside the main entrance to the Nokia Bell Labs facility in Murray Hill, NJ. Is both a corporate building and an Historic Site as other historical markers from IEEE are already on site both inside and outside the building.

Are the original buildings extant?

Yes

Details of the plaque mounting:

Outside the building on a rock or other permanent structure.

How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?

The plaque will be prior to entering the building and thus there is no need to pass through security.

Who is the present owner of the site(s)?

Nokia America

What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)? If personal names are included in citation, include detailed support at the end of this section preceded by "Justification for Inclusion of Name(s)". (see section 6 of Milestone Guidelines)

MBE should be recognized as a foundational technology in nanoscience

Molecular Beam Epitaxy and Al Cho will be forever linked, for the best of semiconductor science. It all began in the late 1960’s – beginning of 1970’s when Al Cho and J.R. Arthur through their experimental ingenuity started to characterize vapor pressures of gallium and arsenic [1] then understand the physical interaction between Arsenic and Gallium in a vacuum environment [2].

At that time, Arthur introduced the term of Molecular Beam, issued from the well-known and established Knudsen evaporation sources … but not yet epitaxy. Other early contributors are John E. Davey, and Titus Pankey n 1968, using a very specific experimental apparatus[3].

All the ingredients to cook the Molecular Beam Epitaxy technique were finally gathered. It came in 1970 that the term Molecular Beam Epitaxy was ‘’finally’’ mentioned, by Al Cho for the first time, in his paper, “Molecular Beam Epitaxy of GaAs, AlGaAs and GaP” [4], followed the next year in his review paper [5] "Film deposition by molecular-beam techniques. Between 1970 and 1974 Al Cho published numerous papers related to MBE growth of GaAs and related materials, their doping, multilayered stacks, in-situ characterization [6]. Al Cho and J.R. Arthur published together in 1975 their article simply titled ‘’Molecular Beam Epitaxy‘’ [7].

In order to understand the significance of what achieved Al Cho specifically we need to point out the fact that the only available techniques to synthetize semiconductor materials by homo- and hetero-epitaxy were Vapor Phase and Liquid Phase Epitaxy with all their limitations and their lack of scalability: to name a few, LPE is not flexible (growth at thermodynamic equilibrium – difficult to grow mismatched material), limited to high growth rate and not adapted to thin epilayers required in current and future devices – VPE is using extremely hazardous precursors and requires very high growth temperatures also meaning that facilities are more stringent to set-up and handle.

From Al Cho early works on a modified Varian-made enclosure, under a secondary vacuum, not originally built to perform epitaxial deposition to the current workhorses of epitaxy able to process multiple 200 mm, 300 mm and up to 450 mm wafers more than 50 years of innovations have been carried-out. As early as the late 1970’s, Al Cho has been advising MBE equipment manufacturers such as RIBER to adapt their vacuum chambers to fit to the needs of semiconductor science. In 1978, Al Cho, Pierre Auger and RIBER have united a community and launch the first MBE International Conference in Paris bringing together 300 scientists from all around the world.

After the development of above-mentioned concept and devices, the age of maturity has arisen for MBE in the 1990’s with the first MBE production reactors, already able to perform the growth on 200 mm substrates (or 4 x 100 mm wafers) and then 300 mm substrates (or 9 x 100 mm) and more recently with the biggest MBE reactor ever manufactured with a 4 x 200 mm capability and up to 450 mm. All these MBE reactors are fully automated and operates 24/7 in semiconductor foundries. All kind of electronic (HEMT, HBT, Hall effect sensors …) and optoelectronic (lasers, SOA, IR photodetectors and sensors …) devices are currently mass produced by MBE in US and China mostly. In addition, hundreds of R&D MBE reactors are used daily by researchers all over the world to develop next gen devices using classical III-V (As-, P-,Sb-based), II-VI, IV-IV, IV-VI, lead-chalcogenides, Transition Metals Dichalogenides, , ZnO, 2D crystals, hybrid topological insulators and ferromagnetics, graphene and hBN. MBE is a key element of the mix of deposition technologies, which include metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) and high-temperature chemical vapor deposition (HTCVD). Together these support fabrication of a wide variety of semiconductor devices which are indispensable in the modern world.

MBE has been considered with so much potential that researchers from NASA and Space Vacuum Center in Houston, TX have carried-out extra-terrestrials experiments in Low Earth Orbit during STS-60 in FEB. 1994, STS-69 in SEP. 1995 and STS-80 in NOV. 1995 in the frame of the Wake Shield Facility program

Footnotes

[1] Vapor pressures and phase equilibria in the GaAs system - J. R. Arthur - Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids, Volume 28, Issue 11, November 1967, Pages 2257-2267

[2 ] Interaction of Ga and AS2 Molecular Beams with GaAs Surfaces - J. R. Arthur J. Appl. Phys. 39, 4032–4034 (July 1 1968)

[3] John E. Davey, and Titus Pankey "Epitaxial GaAs films deposited by vacuum evaporation” Journal of Applied Physics 39.4 (1968): 1941-1948

[4]Cho, A.Y. “Molecular Beam Epitaxy of GaAs, AlGaAs and GaP”" Proc. Symp. GaAs and Related Compounds. Vol. 2. 1970

[5] Cho, Alfred Y. "Film deposition by molecular-beam techniques." Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology 8.5 (1971): S31-S38

[6]Cho, A. Y. "Morphology of epitaxial growth of GaAs by a molecular beam method: The observation of surface structures." Journal of Applied Physics 41.7 (1970): 2780-2786.

[7] Cho, Al Y., and J. R. Arthur. "Molecular beam epitaxy." Progress in solid state chemistry 10 (1975): 157-191.

What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?

Vacuum chambers available at the time were not designed for the epitaxy techniques. These needed to be modified, and techniques invented to grow and create single monolayers of atoms on a semiconductor surface. In addition to the reactor chamber itself, numerous obstacles needed to be overcome from surface preparation, creation of the molecular beam itself with appropriate composition, and all happening within a vacuum chamber.

What features set this work apart from similar achievements?

This is a fundamental discovery allowing for atomic layer control and growth of novel materials. This method has allowed for new devices, such as semiconductor lasers, that have had immeasurable impact on society. MBE today plays an essential role in the fabrication of III-V devices such as GaAs, InP, and GaN each providing unique capabilities in generation and detection of light and well as amplification of high frequency signals such as the radio power amplifiers powering 5G around the world.

Why was the achievement successful and impactful?

MBE offered a technique to engineer materials in a new and novel way and thus create devices unavailable by any other methods. As a result, myriad novel devices have been developed and refined. Today MBE is being used extensively in the worldwide production of III-V devices with ever growing wafer diameters.

Supporting texts and citations to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or chapters in scholarly books. 'Scholarly' is defined as peer-reviewed, with references, and published. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article. All supporting materials must be in English, or accompanied by an English translation.

IEEE Medal of Honor1994 : https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/recipient/alfred-y-cho/
A. Y. Cho, "Device fabrication by molecular-beam epitaxy," 1975 International Electron Devices Meeting, Washington, DC, USA, 1975, pp. 429-432, doi: 10.1109/IEDM.1975.188914.
A. Y. Cho and F. K. Reinhart, "Molecular beam epitaxy of GaAs voltage variable capacitors," in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 1173-1173, Dec. 1973, doi: 10.1109/T-ED.1973.17824.
A.Y. Cho and W.T. Tsang, "Masked Molecular Beam Epitaxy", Integrated and Guided Wave Optics - Technical Digest Series (Optica Publishing Group, 1978), paper WB1
A. Y. Cho and H. C. Casey, "IV-3 GaAs-AlxGa1-xAs double-heterostructure lasers prepared by molecular-beam epitaxy," in IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. 21, no. 11, pp. 741-741, Nov. 1974, doi: 10.1109/T-ED.1974.18028.

Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.

Please email a jpeg or PDF a letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property, and a letter (or forwarded email) from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application to ieee-history@ieee.org with the subject line "Attention: Milestone Administrator." Note that there are multiple texts of the letter depending on whether an IEEE organizational unit other than the section will be paying for the plaque(s).

Please recommend reviewers by emailing their names and email addresses to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please include the docket number and brief title of your proposal in the subject line of all emails.