Semiconductor Materials Genome Initiative: silicon-based light emission material

Abstract

The purpose of the semiconductor Materials Genome Initiative is to discover, develop, and deploy new materials in such a way that the research and development period is reduced to a half of original period, and the cost to a fraction of the present cost, thereby speeding up the advance of clean energy sourse, state security, and human welfare, through the organic integration of experiment, computation and theory. Semiconductors play a key role in developing technologies and industries relating to economy, state security, and human welfare. The implement of the semiconductor materials genome initiative will promote the development of semiconductor science and technology into a new era. In this paper, we present a demo of the semiconductor material genome project through introducing our early work on designing silicon-based light emission materials. We first briefly review the status of development of silicon-compatible light emission and challenges facing it. We then demonstrate the power and value of semiconductor materials genome initiative by presenting our recent work on the inverse design of strongly dipole-allowed direct bandgap two-dimensional Si/Ge superlattices and one-dimensional Si/Ge core/multi-shell nanowires, respectively, from two indirect-gap materials (Si and Ge). We use a combination of genetic algorithms with an atomistic pseudopotential Hamiltonian to search through the astronomic number of variants of Sin/Gem//Sip/Geq stacking sequences. We finally give a short perspective of semiconductor materials genome initiative.