Energy pulse modification of electronic materials: from electronics via photonics to other advanced materials

Regarding electronic materials there is a clear and increasing interest in energy pulse modification of materials, especially also thermal processing far below one second, i.e. the lower limit of RTP (Rapid Thermal Processing) called spike annealing. It is the world of processing in the millisecond or nanosecond range. In the past, this was mainly driven by the need of suppressing the so-called Transient Enhanced Diffusion for 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 than just “classical” silicon electronics. This paper reports shortly about the restart in flash lamp annealing and further on recent experiments regarding shallow junction engineering in germanium and SOI (silicon-on-insulator), annealing of ITO (Indium Tin Oxide) layers on glass and plastic foil interesting for low cost electronics 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.