Modulation doping is a technique for fabricating semiconductors such that the free charge carriers are spatially separated from the donors. Because this eliminates scattering from the donors, modulation-doped semiconductors have very high carrier

mobilities Mobilities is a contemporary paradigm in the social sciences that explores the movement of people (human migration, individual mobility, travel, transport), ideas (see e.g. meme) and things (transport), as well as the broader social implications o ...

History

Modulation doping was conceived in

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

in 1977 following a conversation between

Horst Störmer Horst may refer to: Science * Horst (geology), a raised fault block bounded by normal faults or graben People * Horst (given name) * Horst (surname) * ter Horst, Dutch surname * van der Horst, Dutch surname Places Settlements Germany * Horst, ...

and

Ray Dingle Ray may refer to: Fish * Ray (fish), any cartilaginous fish of the superorder Batoidea * Ray (fish fin anatomy), a bony or horny spine on a fin Science and mathematics * Ray (geometry), half of a line proceeding from an initial point * Ray (gra ...

, and implemented shortly afterwards by

Arthur Gossard Arthur C. Gossard was a professor of materials and electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1982, he co-discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect. His research is related to molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). He has a ...

. In 1977, Störmer and Dan Tsui used a modulation-doped wafer to discover the

fractional quantum Hall effect The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) is a physical phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2-dimensional (2D) electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at fractional values of e^2/h. It is a property of a collective state in which elec ...

Implementation

Modulation-doped semiconductor crystals are commonly grown by

epitaxy Epitaxy refers to a type of crystal growth or material deposition in which new crystalline layers are formed with one or more well-defined orientations with respect to the crystalline seed layer. The deposited crystalline film is called an epit ...

to allow successive layers of different semiconductor species to be deposited. One common structure uses a layer of AlGaAs deposited over GaAs, with Si n-type donors in the AlGaAs.

Applications

Field effect transistors

Modulation-doped

transistors upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...

can reach high electrical mobilities and therefore fast operation. A modulation-doped field-effect transistor is known as a

MODFET A high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT), also known as heterostructure FET (HFET) or modulation-doped FET (MODFET), is a field-effect transistor incorporating a junction between two materials with different band gaps (i.e. a heterojunction) ...

Low-temperature electronics

One advantage of modulation doping is that the charge carriers cannot become trapped on the donors even at the lowest temperatures. For this reason, modulation-doped heterostructures allow electronics operating at

cryogenic In physics, cryogenics is the production and behaviour of materials at very low temperatures. The 13th IIR International Congress of Refrigeration (held in Washington DC in 1971) endorsed a universal definition of “cryogenics” and “cr ...

temperatures.

Quantum computing

Modulation-doped

two-dimensional electron gas A two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is a scientific model in solid-state physics. It is an electron gas that is free to move in two dimensions, but tightly confined in the third. This tight confinement leads to quantized energy levels for motion ...

es can be gated to create

quantum dots Quantum dots (QDs) are semiconductor particles a few nanometres in size, having optical and electronic properties that differ from those of larger particles as a result of quantum mechanics. They are a central topic in nanotechnology. When the ...

Electrons The electron ( or ) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary particles because they have no ...

trapped in these dots can then be operated as quantum bits.

References

{{Reflist Semiconductor device fabrication