Michael O. Thompson

Dr. Thompson received his B.S. in Applied Physics from Cal Tech in 1979 and M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell in 1984. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty in the Department of Materials Science at Cornell continuing his work on the interaction of materials with intense laser sources. He has co-authored over 100 journal publications, is co-inventor on 25 patents, and has founded or co-founded three startup companies. He was the recipient of the 2009 SEMI Award for technical contributions to the semiconductor industry.

For the past 28 years, Dr. Thompson’s research has focused extensively on the behavior of semiconductor materials under pulsed and CW laser exposure. On the fundamental level, his group has explored limits to crystal growth under the extreme conditions of laser irradiation, including limits to metastable impurity incorporation, behavior of point defects, interface stability, explosive crystallization, and group IV heteroepitaxy. Key to this work has been the development of quantitative methods to monitor the kinetics of both melt and non-melt laser annealing of ultra-shallow junctions. In the late 1990s, he was involved in the development of melt-annealing methods to fabricate thin-film transistors on glass and flexible substrates. Over the past decade, he helped to develop the use of CW lasers for non-melt laser annealing (LSA–Laser Spike Annealing) of ultra-shallow junctions in advanced VLSI nodes.

His group currently is active in exploring new applications for LSA both within and beyond the microelectronics community. Areas of research include dopant activation and deactivation in compound semiconductors (InGaAs, GaN, GaO2), thin-film amorphous oxide semiconductors (IGZO), metastable phase formation in metallic glasses and complex oxides during LSA quench, mesoscale structuring of organic and inorganic materials in the millisecond timescale, and development of novel processes for EUV and DSA lithography. He is also currently the director of the ACCESS (AFRL Cornell Center for Epitaxial Solutions) center focused on understanding fundamental materials issues in GaO2 power devices.