Anthony Peaker

Biography

I am Emeritus Professor of Electronic Materials in the School of Electrical Engineering and Electronics. My research speciality is defects in semiconductors and the impact they have on devices. I joined the University in 1975 after spending 8 years as the manager of Ferranti''s Photon Devices Group. This group produced the world''s first commercial light emitting diodes emitting in the visible part of the spectrum. The topic of light emission from semiconductors (photoluminescence, LEDs and LASERs) has continued to be an important part of my research work at Manchester University. I was involved in the early work to develop LASERs and detectors for long distance fibre optic communications in the 1.33m and 1.54úm bands and III-V devices for low noise amplifiers. In 1983 I was granted leave to spend a year at Monsanto (now SunEdison) in St Louis USA on silicon materials research. When I returned to Manchester much of my subsequent work focussed on defects in silicon, germanium and silicon germanium. In 1997 I was granted a Royal Academy of Engineering Foresight Award to spend a year at the joint French-German (CNRS/Max Plank Institute) High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble working on novel methods to study defects in semiconductors and there worked extensively on the realisation of a working system for Laplace (high resolution) Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy. In the last few years I have devoted much of my time to the study of the electronic properties and application of quantum dot nanostructures in several different material systems using the techniques pioneered during my visit to Grenoble and was developed into a practical system firstly under an EU project and then very recently into an easily used versitile system under a UK EPSRC award. The technique is now being used by us in many diverse fields: to study the extremely thin dielectrics that will be used in future generations of integrated circuits. to understand ion implantation defects (in collaboration with the national facility at Surrey University where we have installed an in-line system for measurements during implantation, to look at degredation and defects in solar cells. Future developments include optically excited LDLTS to study quantum dots and very wide band gap semiconductors such as ZnO and GaN based materials. The work is described in more detail on our Laplace DLTS website.