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Among the phase change materials, Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST-225) is the most studied and is already integrated into many devices. N doping is known to significantly improve some key characteristics such as the thermal stability of materials and the resistance drift of devices. However, the origin, at the atomic scale, of these alterations is rather elusive. The most important issue is to understand how N doping affects the crystallization characteristics, mechanisms and kinetics, of GST-225. Here, we report the results of a combination of in situ and ex situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) investigations carried out on specifically designed samples to evidence the influence of N concentration on the crystallization kinetics and resulting morphology of the alloy. Beyond the known shift of the crystallization temperature and the observation of smaller grains, we show that N renders the crystallization process more “nucleation dominated” and ascribe this characteristic to the increased viscosity of the amorphous state. This increased viscosity is linked to the mechanical rigidity and the reduced diffusivity resulting from the formation of Ge–N bonds in the amorphous phase. During thermal annealing, N hampers the coalescence of the crystalline grains and the cubic to hexagonal transition. Making use of AbStrain, a recently invented TEM-based technique, we evidence that the nanocrystals formed from the crystallization of N-doped amorphous GST-225 are under tension, which suggests that N is inserted in the lattice and explains why it is not found at grain boundaries. Globally, all these results demonstrate that the origin of the effect of N on the crystallization of GST-225 is not attributed to the formation of a secondary phase such as a nitride, but to the ability of N to bind to Ge in the amorphous and crystalline phases and to unbind and rebind with Ge along the diffusion path of this atomic species during annealing.

This paper revisits a recently introduced chemostat model of one–species with a periodic input of a single nutrient which is described by a system of delay differential equations. Previous results provided sufficient conditions ensuring the existence and uniqueness of a periodic solution for arbitrarily small delays. This paper partially extends these results by proving—with the construction of Lyapunov–like functions—that the evoked periodic solution is globally asymptotically stable when considering Monod uptake functions and a particular family of nutrient inputs.

An ecological model describing the competition for a single substrate of an arbitrary number of species is considered. The mortality rates of the species are not supposed to have all the same value and the growth function of the substrate is not supposed to be linear or decreasing. Intra-specific competition is taken into account. Under additional technical assumptions, we establish that the model admits a globally asymptotically stable positive equilibrium point. This ensures persistence of the species. Our proof relies on a Lyapunov function.

In a recent work Cantrell, Cosner and Ruan show that intraspecific interference is responsible for coexistence of many consumers for one resource with a logistic like growth rate. Recently, we have established a similar result for the case of a chemostat using a rather different technique. In the present note, we complement these two works to the case of an unknown nonlinear growth rate for the resource satisfying mild assumptions.

In this work, we demonstrate for the first time a 300-mm indium–gallium–arsenic (InGaAs) wafer on insulator (InGaAs-OI) substrates by splitting in an InP sacrificial layer. A 30-nm-thick InGaAs layer was successfully transferred using low temperature direct wafer bonding (DWB) and Smart CutTM technology. Three key process steps of the integration were therefore specifically developed and optimized. The first one was the epitaxial growing process, designed to reduce the surface roughness of the InGaAs film. Second, direct wafer bonding conditions were investigated and optimized to achieve non-defective bonding up to 600 °C. Finally, we adapted the splitting condition to detach the InGaAs layer according to epitaxial stack specifications. The paper presents the overall process flow that achieved InGaAs-OI, the required optimization, and the associated characterizations, namely atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM), and HR-XRD, to insure the crystalline quality of the post transferred layer.

This paper reports the first demonstration of 300 mm In0.53Ga0.47As-on-insulator (InGaAs-OI) substrates. The use of direct wafer bonding and the Smart Cut™ technology lead to the transfer of high quality InGaAs layer on large Si wafer size (300 mm) at low effective cost, taking into account the reclaim of the III–V on Si donor substrate. The optimization of the three key building blocks of this technology is detailed. (1) The III–V epitaxial growth on 300 mm Si wafers has been optimized to decrease the defect density. (2) For the first time, hydrogen-induced thermal splitting is made inside the indium phosphide (InP) epitaxial layer and a wide implantation condition ranges is observed on the contrary to bulk InP. (3) Finally a specific direct wafer bonding with alumina oxide has been chosen to avoid outgas diffusion at the alumina oxide/III–V compound interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]