During the past 80 years, modern applied physics has pushed, inspired, and produced major high-tech industries, from computing, communication, memory, display, transportation, to energy. This has been unprecedented in human history of science and technology. Applied physics has played a drastically different role than the conventional paths taken by academic (ivory tower) science and traditional industries. Quantum phenomena (and theories), new materials/atomic-scale thin films (and their fabrication tools such as molecular beam epitaxy, atomic layer deposition, metal-organic chemical vapor deposition), novel (and high performance) devices, and atomic-scale probing tools have been intertwined and generated useful and essential products beneficial to human being, for example in revolutionizing computing/communication, drastically improving medical diagnosis, etc.
Moreover and very importantly, new physics/application has been discovered, leading to Nobel Prizes; transistor, lasers, quantum Hall effect/fractional quantum Hall effect, fiber optics, charge-coupled devices, to name a few.
Modern applied physics is not just a branch of physics. It has been and is strongly engaging materials science, electrical engineering, and high-tech industries. We have designed this new course of Selected Special Topics in Contemporary Applied Physics – I in Spring Semester of 2012. The focus will be on nano-electronics for post Si CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) and energy, two most important fields needing thorough understanding of physics and new materials. These two topics are strongly relevant to Taiwan’s industry.
In nano-electronics, the high-k plus metal gate, which replaced conventional SiO2 and poly-Si and resolved the gate leakage issue in the 45 nm MOSFET production, is one of the most important recent innovations in CMOS, and puts the dominant role of Si as the major semiconductor into question. The new technology of high-(83db) plus metal gate on high mobility semiconductors like Ge and InGaAs hybrid with Si will lead to faster devices and close the so-called performance gap, where the expected increase in switching speed of the devices no longer keeps up with the scaling trend. Further, continuously increasing transistor count per chip has increased the overall power consumption, thus the performance per watt of energy consumption has become a key figure-of-merit. The high mobility materials offer distinct advantages over Si in achieving high performance at low supply voltages, thus reducing power consumptions. The present feverish world-wide research efforts are integrating advanced research programs on nano-science, nano-materials, and nano-electronics cohesively to enable a high performance “green” IC technology.
Energy is the most sought after topic worldwide recently. Nuclear energy and solar energy are critically important for reducing CO2, leading to a greener environment.
CEOs or senior managers of top industrial companies on nano-electronics and energy in Taiwan as well as international experts have agreed and/or been invited to come to NTU to give lectures.

Introduction – 1 week
Modern x-ray diffraction and crystallography – 2 weeks
Photoemission – 1 week
Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy – 1 week
Novel thin film growth (MBE) – 2 weeks
Novel thin film growth (MOCVD) – 1 week
Novel thin film growth (ALD) – 1 week
Semiconductor physics (introduction level) – 2 weeks
Nano-electronics (I) Si-based MOSFET – 1 week
Nano-electronics (II) InGaAs and Ge MOSFET – 2 weeks
Nuclear reactor/energy – 1 week
Material criteria for solar cells – 1 week
Solar cells – CIGS and others – 2 weeks
Mid-term oral – 1 week
Final orals – 1 week