The Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering (EEE) at UCL was created 125 years ago and is the first Electrical Engineering Department in the UK. The Department is one of the leading research-led departments in its subject area worldwide. The department currently has around 35 Academic Staff, around 25 Research Fellows and over 100 Doctoral Research Students. Each year the Department produces around 250 Publications and 5 filed Patents. UCL has recently invested £2.5 million to establish new Molecular Beam Epitaxy facility with the capacity to grow As-, P-, and Sb-based III-V compound materials, and wide range characterization facilities for epitaxial materials and devices, such as High-Resolution X-ray, Photoluminescence Mapping system, AFM and SIMS. From 2006, UCL has invested over £20 million to install the state-of-the-art III-V device processing facilities including items such as Focused Ion beam processing, e-beam lithography, wet etching, dry etching (ICP), dielectric deposition, and metallization at London Centre for Nanotechnology. All these state-of-the-art facilities are available to this programme. Relevant research has included
- the epitaxial material growth for III-V compounds, including quantum dots, thin film and nanowires,
- solar cell design, processing, and characterization
- III-V photonics device design, growth, processing, and characterization.
Role in the project
UCL EEE department main expertise that will be brought to the project concerns the development of the epitaxial growth for GaAs reference solar cells and GaAs-based quantum-dot solar cells. In the meantime, UCL will take care of the device fabrication and characterizations of GaAs-based and quantum dot solar cells.