PhD Studentship: Correlating Local Defects to Global Wafer Properties in Next Generation Semiconductor Platforms

Funding

EPSRC CASE Competition Studentship in partnership with Tescan Ltd, offering the award of fees, together with a tax-free maintenance grant of £19,237 and an additional Top-Up of £3,300 per year for 3.5 years.  Training and support will also be provided.

Lead Supervisor’s full name & email address

Professor Rik Drummond-Brydson – r.m.drummond-brydson@leeds.ac.uk

Co-supervisor name(s)

Professor Andy Brown – a.p.brown@leeds.ac.uk

Professor Paul Meredith (External) – Swansea University

Project summary 

Societal recognition of the criticality of semiconductor-technology arises from national initiatives, public debate around sovereign supply and the central role of the sector in delivering net zero. This joint Leeds-Swansea University PhD project in collaboration with Industry partners (Tescan, the National Physics Laboratory and the companies of the South Wales CSconnected Cluster) will focus on characterising semiconductors at the wafer-scale using new advanced electron microscopy capabilities. It will investigate defects, interfacial epitaxies, doping profiles/distributions and lateral uniformities in devices and seeks to correlate these defects with reliability and failure modes, so developing metrology methods and enhancing data integration.

This studentship will be part of an exciting new Doctoral Training Initiative called UK Semiconductor Industry Future Skills or UK-SIFS for short. UK-SIFS will provide valuable and highly practical skills of substantial relevance to the UK semiconductor industry such as formal cleanroom fabrication training, vacuum systems maintenance and operation, process control (six sigma) in semiconductor manufacturing, semiconductor supply chains and export control, semiconductor packaging, and technology translation in the semiconductor sector. The Initiative will create two cohorts of students in 2024 and 2025 across Swansea University and the University of Leeds and is a collaboration between the two universities, the Royce Institute, and industry partners such as KLA, QinetiQ, IQE, NSG Pilkington, Renishaw, Edwards Vacuum, Space Forge, Paragraph, Tescan, Vishay Maxpower, National Physical Laboratory, Paragraf and many others. Our partners will co-deliver the DTI training content, plus co-supervise PhD research projects, plus there will also be a programme of secondments at industry partner sites. UK-SIFS provides not only the considerable benefits of research training and collaboration across a multidisciplinary cohort working in areas such as power electronics, clean energy, bioelectronics and sensing, THz devices, optoelectronics, molecular semiconductors, quantum technology, electronic glass and advanced heterogeneous integration, but is also a unique opportunity for those students who may want to connect closely with the semiconductor and related industries for their PhD and aspire to be the future leaders of the sector in the UK and beyond.

References

None

Please state your entry requirements plus any necessary or desired background

First or Upper Second Class UK Bachelor (Honours) or equivalent

Subject Area

Materials Science, Manufacturing, Nanotechnology, Semiconductors

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