Short time thermal processing: From electronics via photonics to pipe organs of the 17th century

There is a clear and increasing interest in short time thermal processing far below one second, i.e. the lower limit of RTP (Rapid Thermal Processing) called spike annealing. It is the world of preocessing in the millisecond or nanosecond range. This was driven by the need of suppressing the so-called Transient Enhanced Diffusion in advanced boron-implanted shallow pn-junctions in the front-end silicon chip technology. Meanwhile the interest in flash lamp annealing (FLA) in the millisecond range spread out into other fields related to silicon technology and beyond. This paper reports shortly about the restart in flash lamp annealing of the Rossendorf group in collaboration with the Mattson group and further on recent experiments regarding shallow junction engineering in germanium, annealing of ITO layers on glass and plastic foil to form an conductive layer as well as investigations which we did during the last years in the field of wide band gap semiconductor materials (SiC, ZnO). Moreover recent achievements in the field of silicon-based light emission basing on Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Light Emitting Devices will be reported. Finally it will be demonstrated that the basic principle of short time thermal processing, i.e. surface heating on a colder bulk, features also advantages regarding the casting of lead sheets to produce organ pipes in the spirit of the 17th century.