Hi-tech success

The success of two technologies highlights the benefits to be gained from identifying gaps in scientific projects. SUE McALISTER reports

Two new inventions by a Monash researcher have led to the university’s commercial involvement with some of the world’s leading high-technology companies.

And Dr Andrei Nikulin, a Senior Logan Research Fellow in the Department of Physics, is the scientist behind both inventions.

One of Dr Nikulin’s developments is an exceptionally accurate technique for measuring the performance of semiconductors used by, among others, the giant American electronics companies Intel and Motorola. The other is a highly efficient vacuum chamber now in use in Japan.

These technologies have involved Dr Nikulin and Monash’s School of Physics and Materials Engineering in cutting-edge research and development with foreign institutions.

Dr Nikulin’s technique for assessing the purity and capabilities of semiconductors, commonly known as chips, is widely regarded as the best in existence. The technique can play a crucial role in determining which materials will be used to make chips, how they will be manufactured and hence which direction many emerging technologies will take.

Dr Nikulin has worked for many years in collaboration with Innovations for High Performance Microelectronics (IHP), the leading German development centre for semiconductor technology.

In its latest report, IHP has listed Monash for the first time as one of its official collaborators. IHP and Intel recently announced the launch of a joint $3 billion enterprise, Communicant Semiconductor Technologies AG, which will focus on producing equipment for the rapidly growing wireless and broadband communication markets.

Its potentially revolutionary silicon-germanium-carbon semiconductors will have been tested using Dr Nikulin’s technique.

This illustrates another potential benefit of intellectual niche marketing – it affords the opportunity for commercial involvement with some of the world’s biggest and richest high-technology companies.

Semiconductor devices are tiny crystalline solids made of layers of semiconductor and metallic elements. They can contain up to millions of transistors that regulate the electric current passing through them. They’re cheaper, more efficient and smaller by several orders of magnitude than old-fashioned valves.

In fact, today’s chips are so small that determining their purity involves measuring distances between individual atoms. Instru-ments which can do this have been around for a while, but most are slow, give a result with a wide margin of error and often need the chip to be sliced and therefore destroyed.

Dr Nikulin’s invention minimises or eradicates these drawbacks. His Phase-Retrieval X-Ray Diffractometry (PRXRD) technique permits non-destructive, highly accurate analysis of the interaction of X-rays with the solid surfaces inside a semiconductor.

Within minutes, it can provide detail of the structure of crystals and hence the purity and efficiency of chips down to the atomic level.

If research institutes or companies make awrong decision, especially in the early stages of a new semiconductor project, it can be very costly. Yet it is becoming harder for them to obtain accurate analyses of the purity of chips, because in order to make more efficient, inexpensive and user-friendly computers, cell-phones and other hi-tech products, the size of semiconductors has to decrease while their capacity increases.

So it is no wonder Dr Nikulin’s technique has been hailed as a breakthrough, because it enables scientists to speedily and accurately determine whether a project is headed down the right track.

Another good example of intellectual niche marketing is the vacuum chamber that Dr Nikulin recently installed at Japan’s Super-Photon-ring-8 (SPring-8), the most powerful synchrotron in the world.

A synchrotron, also known as a particle accelerator, is a microscope which enables scientists to examine the structure of things down to the sub-atomic level.

The Monash-built chamber will permit much better quality data to be collected from photons being accelerated by the SPring-8.

“Air is removed from the chamber as it’s a gas and therefore scatters photons passing through it, making measurements inaccurate. The effect of the air and hence the inaccuracy of measurements increases along with the size of the synchrotron, according to what’s called the signal-to-noise ratio,” Dr Nikulin said.

“Consequently, for an accelerator as powerful as the SPring-8, the removal of air is exceptionally important. It allows sample detectors and other equipment in the chamber to take measurements which are many orders of magnitude more precise than would otherwise be possible, permitting almost error-free analysis.”

Australia’s first synchrotron is expected to be built at Monash’s Clayton campus in the next 18 months (see previous page).

“Australian pharmaceutical, biochemical and other high-tech industries will benefit from being able to use the Monash synchrotron,” Dr Nikulin says. “However, to defray costs and promote vital scientific cross-fertilisation, academic and industrial concerns from overseas should be encouraged to use it as well.

“Our experience in supplying the vacuum chamber to the Japanese synchrotron, and working there with some of the world’s top scientists and biggest corporations, will be of enormous help in making the most of Monash’s synchrotron.”

ACTION: For more details about Dr Nikulin’s PRXRD technique and synchrotron vacuum chamber, contact +61 3 9905 1353 or email andrei.nikulin@spme.monash.edu.au

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