OVERVIEW OF CENTRAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES

The facility is a new $140 million building occupied by 250 researchers and supporting staff. Matsushita has sales of $79 billion per year and 265,397 employees worldwide. The company spends over $4 billion on research and development. The research areas of the Central Research Laboratories include the following:

• advanced science
  • functional mechanisms of biological molecular machines
  • human interface
  • intelligent electronics
• materials
  • nanostructure controlled materials
  • magnetic, piezoelectric, and dielectric materials
  • superconductive materials
  • nanoscale fine milling technology
• thin films
  • low cost and large area films
  • dielectric thin films
  • diamond and SiC thin films ("new diamond")
• devices
  • light modulators
  • quantum devices
  • high efficiency light emitters
  • blue semiconductor lasers

In 1996, the scientists of the Central Research Laboratories published 133 papers in Japan and 45 papers overseas. They also filed 33 overseas patents and a much larger number of patents in Japan.

NEW DIAMOND GROUP

The prime area of interest of the group is in materials research on CVD diamond and SiC films. The research is company funded. However, a $4 million per year, 6-year funding from NEDO has been shared among 5 companies and some universities for combustion control systems for energy conservation. The project will be continued for another year. The device applications are primarily the responsibility of the Matsushita Electronic Corporation Research Laboratory.

Dr. Kitabatake is an expert in growth simulation techniques (Kitabatake 1997). Most of his effort seems to be centered on 3C-SiC heteroepitaxial growth on Si and related problems of surface reconstruction. NEDO has supported the work.

He also reported on the growth of 3C-SiC CVD/MBE films (Uchida et al. 1998). Molecular dynamics simulations have been conducted with the University of Illinois group (Kitabatake and Greene 1996).

Another project involves CVD diamond growth. Deguchi et al. (1997) have reported on piezoelectric properties of polycrystalline p-type diamond CVD films doped by boron. This work has been a joint research effort with the Osaka University group. The deposition conditions are as follows:

• gas source CO/H₂/B₂H₆
• total gas flow 110 sccm
• CO/H² ratio1.85%
• pressure 4,000 Pa
• microwave power 300 W
• substrate temperature 900^oC

The p-type films are about 2 microns thick and are grown on insulating polycrystalline diamond substrates. Piezoresistors have 500-micron x 50-micron dimensions and have shown gauge factors of 1000 and 700 at room temperature and at 200^oC, respectively. This compares with a gauge factor of 150 for p-type Si films.

The group is also involved in research on UV detectors for combustion control.

REFERENCES