Ghassan received the chemical engineering degree from the university of Applied Science, Berlin, Germany in 2001. In 2022 he took over the position of sales director at ELEMENT 3-5 GmbH with a special focus on the product management for the ACCELERATOR 3500K. Prior to this, he worked as an independent consultant in the semiconductor industry. Before that, he joined Ebner Group in 2011 and held several roles within the sapphire department (FAMETEC) In 2018, he built up within the group the SiC crystal growth division, which is a spin-off company since 2020. Before that, he worked at AIXTRON in R&D for development of high-k and metal gate for CMOS applications by CVD/PECVD. Ghassan holds over 15 patents in crystal growth of Sapphire and SiC.
Wide-bandgap materials are grown by high temperature chemical vapor deposition (CVD) or metal-organic CVD (MOCVD). The possibilities and limits for (MO)CVD are already reached out. In this work we describe another epitaxial process called Next Level Epitaxy (NLE), which uses a surface temperature around 250°C for AlN growth and combines PVD (physical vapor deposition) and PECVD (Plasma enhanced CVD) with in-house developed plasma sources. The growth procedure is similar to that in (MO)CVD. This presentation gives the key benefits of NLE. NLE and its impact on the mass production of wide-bandgap films are discussed. With its in-line concept NLE is a game changer.