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A major part of his career has been engaged in the technology of compound semiconductors, especially from the III-V family of semiconductors (using elements from group III and group V of the periodic table), which are of great interest for the high speed electronics and optical properties. These materials include Gallium Arsenide, Indium Phosphide, Gallium Phosphide and ternary combinations of these elements, sometimes also involving Aluminum. He has had hands-on experience in many aspects of compound semiconductor work, including materials growth (epitaxy etc), materials characterization, device processing, device analysis, materials analysis, diffusion processes, diffusion and epitaxy theory, and especially applications of compound semiconductors in telecom, consumer and other deployment sectors. He has managed and worked with teams involved in wider aspects of this work, and has chaired conferences on semi-insulating materials as well as Gallium Arsenide Integrated circuits. He has also taught University graduate courses on the subject.

Heterojunction bipolar transistors exploit the physics of bandgap differences to enhance the characteristics of transistor performance. These involve choosing a material of narrower bandgap to create the base region, and this can be done conveniently using compound semiconducting materials. An example of a heterojunction bipolar transistor structure could use Gallium Aluminum Arsenide for the emitter material to enhance the carrier flow from base to emitter, accelerated by the electric field of the base (Gallium Arsenide) to emitter (GaAlAs) bandgap difference.
He did early work on this topic with a PhD student in France, and when he moved to Canada was able to set in motion a programme that resulted in eventual deployment of HBT devices for high speed power and digital integrated circuits in new telecommunications products for use at 10Gb/s and beyond.

Indium Phosphide (InP) is a compound semiconductor that has beneficial optical and electronic properties, in comparison to silicon for example. The great advantage of the InP family is the capability to make direct bandgap (efficient) light emitters at infrared wavelengths corresponding to the windows of transmission in optical fiber. So the conjunction of InP device technology with that of silica fiber has resulted in a revolution of telecommunications.
Now the fruits of that technology wave are starting to diffuse into other application domains, such as biomedical diagnostics (using infrared light to do non-invasive testing through the skin for medical conditions etc).
He has worked on many aspects of InP technology, from materials growth and diffusion through to device and integrated circuit manufacture. He also has strong knowledge of the physics of the compound semiconductor systems including InP.

He has been involved in several aspects of photonics technology, ranging from materials and device fabrication to systems deployment and applications development.
Photonics is the use of photons (light 'particles') to carry information or do work, analogous to the way we harness electrons to do tasks in electronics.
Photonics offers extraordinarily large bandwidth for information transfer (hence the major interest in telecommunications deployment of photonics technology), and also has inherent assets by way of using wireless light beams, which in some cases can be used to penetrate materials or surfaces not accessible to electronic signals.
In recent years he was involved in establishing a Centre for Photonics Research at the University of Ottawa, and also he was Director of the Canadian Photonics Consortium - an Industry Trade organisation encouraging and developing national and international opportunities in photonics.

During his work on new devices in Gallium Arsenide and Indium Phosphide, he acquired experience in many aspects of device operation, and necessarily in the analysis of device structures and their physical and chemical properties. This involved familiarity with measurement of device characteristics, behaviour and composition of underlying materials, troubleshooting failure mechanisms and reliability issues, and developing novel ways to access properties of material embedded deep within an operating device (for example the mobility of electrons within the active channel of a field effect transistor). He developed new approaches (for example Geometric Magnetoresistance) that could be applied directly to a microwave field effect transistor to determine the electron mobility underneath the 0.5 micron long gate electrode.

A special feature of two of the compound semiconductors (Gallium Arsenide and Indium Phosphide) is that they can be prepared to be very high in resistivity, which is a great advantage to substrates for the fabrication of high speed electronic and optical devices, because of the reduced losses involved.
Since 1978 he has been heavily engaged in the industry-wide pursuit of improved semi-insulating substrates, seeking more stable and cost effective materials with the necessary properties. He started a conference series on this topic in 1980, bringing together Industry users and developers with Academic researchers, to enlarge the community communications across a topic involving many different disciplines. He ran the first conference in the UK, then assisted for many years, chairing a conference in Toronto ten years later. The same conference series continues to run in 2007. His knowledge in this field includes materials chemistry, growth and processing steps, device manufacture and substrate dependencies, as well as the many characterisation tools involved in understanding the substrate behaviour.

Vapour phase epitaxy (VPE) is a preferred method for deposition of thin oriented crystal films onto substrates. It is used extensively in the semiconductor industry, especially where high purity films with low structural defect counts are required and in some cases where different film compositions are needed in special structures. He has several years of hands-on experience growing InP and GaAs using trichloride transport VPE, and also has been involved with other types of VPE using Metal Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD).
His work has included growing and characterising layers for field effect transistors, microwave diodes, Hall effect devices, optical detectors etc. He is familiar with the basic principles of epitaxial development under vapor growth conditions and has recently been consulting on the topic of carbon nanotube growth by VPE.

Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) is a binary semiconductor (synthesised using gallium and arsenic) that has advantageous properties in comparison to single element semiconductors, such as silicon or germanium. Chief among the assets of GaAs are high electron mobility (some 3-7 times faster than silicon) and the ability to make GaAs in a highly resistive form, providing excellent substrates for high speed devices, or means to electrically separate adjacent functions in a GaAs-based integrated circuit. This technology enabled a couple of generations of high speed transistors and circuits that propelled data rates in telecoms and wireless communications to new levels. Variants of GaAs, such as added aluminum (creating GaAlAs) gave us the laser used in CD players. He has been heavily involved in many aspects of this technology, from research and materials growth through to device and circuit manufacture, and commercial applications in systems (for telecom as well as military needs). He chaired the major international conference on GaAs Integrated Circuits in 1993, and has been invited to several NATO sponsored workshops on the future of Microelectronics. The experience obtained working on this field extends into other related areas involving similar combinations of engineering, physics and chemistry.

A major application of GaAs technology has been in the fabrication of high speed transistors for both digital and microwave applications. The high electron velocities of GaAs and InP materials enable their use in digital circuits running at 10Gb/s upto 100Gb/s and also for microwave devices from 900MHz up to 60GHz and beyond. He has been heavily involved in the technology and development of these devices, and his understanding of their operation also relates to other devices in III-V materials and to devices made in silicon and combined families.

He researched, analysed and reported on the emerging market for Organic Light Emitting Diodes, for a Canadian Government Laboratory. He reviewed a number of patents on electro-optic devices and provided recommendations on applications value.He assembled the information and coordinated the submission of a successful proposal for Research Investments tax reimbursement for a small Ottawa Start-up company.He prepared and facilitated a workshop on applications of photonics to biomedical needs, for an Industrial player considering expansion into that arena.He assisted a small mature company in the preparation of a proposal submission for government subsidy of a project to explore use of Light Emitting Diodes in a medical device application.