Electron Beam Heating and Atomic Restructuring of Sapphire Surfaces

NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed a new way to reduce the high-temperature heating requirement of sapphire substrates in wafer production. The growth of high-quality and single-crystal epitaxy layers on sapphires requires uniform and high-temperature heating to accommodate restructuring of the sapphire surface to be aluminum-terminated. These requirements (uniform heating and re-structuring of sapphire substrates) are challenging for high-yield and high-quality production. This innovation offers a new way to reduce the high-temperature heating requirement of sapphire substrates and at the same time create the morphological restructure of sapphire surface required.