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Breakthrough in MOCVD growth facilitates pick-and-place of optoelectronic nitride devices.  The discovery behind the growth technique is that boron nitride grows as a 2-D material on sapphire but in a highly disorganized form on silica. Subsequent gallium nitride based materials grow well on h-BN on sapphire, but not on amorphous BN on silica.  By prepatterning sapphire templates with silica then growing h-BN and then nitride based device structures, individual devices can be mechanically separated, eliminated needs for wafer dicing.  

2-D materials are promising for the creation of ultra-cheap flexible electronics using special purpose optoelectronic semiconductors such as Gallium Nitride.  A recent collaboration has led to major advances in the ability to transfer of 2-D materials for device fabrication and in the understanding of a technique called "remote epitaxy", which allows the growth of arbitrary materials on 2-D layers. These layers can then be easily transfered to other supports or transfered and integrated with other semiconductor materials.  This breakthrough technique has the potential to make devices based on 2-D materials commercially viable. 

A team of semiconductor researchers based in France has used a boron nitride separation layer to grow indium gallium nitride (InGaN) solar cells that were then lifted off their original sapphire substrate and placed onto a glass substrate. 

ECE Ph.D. student Taha Ayari won the Young Scientist Award at the 2018 European Materials Research Society Meeting, held June 18-22 in Strasbourg, France.

The paper, "Global mapping of stratigraphy of an old-master painting using sparsity-based terahertz reflectometry," is the 6th most read paper in Scientific Reports for 2017.