Mechanical Properties of Some Iii-v and Ii-vi Semiconductor Alloys: a Micro and Nanoindentation Approaches

Semiconductors, the major area of research in materials science, have offered solutions to several important technological problems and provided many devices for day to day applications. Development in novel semiconductor materials such as heterostructure systems and the ever-diminishing size of devices are producing an explosion of interest and activity in the field of semiconductor materials and devices. The characterization of epitaxial layers and their surfaces have benefited a lot from the enormous progress of micro and nanomechanical analysis techniques. In particular, the dramatic improvement of the structural quality of semiconductor materials results from the level of sophistication achieved with such analysis techniques. First of all, micromechanical technique is nondestructive and its sensitivity has been improved to such an extent that nowadays the epilayer analysis can be performed on layers with thicknesses ranging on the atomic scale. Thus, this book addresses some of the collective works on III-V semiconductors which could be to be extremely important from a technological point of view, i.e., for the surveillance of modern semiconductor processes.