SAXS for Semiconductors
Modern semiconductor layers rarely succeed or fail because of composition alone. What matters just as much is how the material crystallizes, textures, phase-separates, and builds interfaces during coating, vapor deposition, annealing, or encapsulation. Grain size and orientation, nanocrystal connectivity, porosity, and interfacial structure can evolve over minutes during processing and continue to drift under heat, light, electric bias, oxygen, or moisture. For emerging solution-processed semiconductors in particular, the “film-formation pathway” often determines the final microstructure and device reproducibility.
Laboratory SAXS/WAXS provides quantitative access to these structural outcomes and their evolution: SAXS resolves nanoscale morphology and heterogeneity, while WAXS tracks crystalline phases, crystallite size, and disorder. In thin-film semiconductors, grazing-incidence geometries (GISAXS/GIWAXS) are widely used to probe near-surface and in-plane organization and to follow texture development and structural gradients under controlled environments such as temperature and solvent-vapor exposure, with workflows increasingly supported by advanced lab-scale GI scattering setups and analysis tools.
Questions you can answer with SAXS for Semiconductors
How does the grain size and texture of perovskite absorber layers evolve during annealing or solvent-vapor treatment?
Does a solution-processed organic semiconductor (e.g. P3HT, NFA blends) form a dense film or a nanophase-separated morphology after coating?
What nanocrystal size distribution develops in metal-oxide semiconductors (ZnO, TiO₂, SnO₂) after calcination or UV treatment?
How uniform is the nanostructure across multilayer semiconductor stacks such as transport layers and absorber interfaces?
Does humidity or thermal stress induce early nanoscale reorganization in perovskite or organic semiconductor films?
How does nanoparticle packing and porosity evolve in printed or coated semiconductor inks?