About State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices

State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices

The State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices is hosted by the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) at its Shahe campus in Chengdu, Sichuan. It is China's national platform for the science of electronic thin films and their integration into devices. This profile is fenced to the laboratory itself. Its host university is described only where the laboratory's setting and standing require it.

Setting: Chengdu and China's electronics university

The laboratory's host was founded in 1956, on the instruction of Premier Zhou Enlai, as the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering, formed from the electronics divisions of Jiaotong University, the Nanjing Institute of Technology and the South China Institute of Technology. Renowned as China's cradle for the national electronic industry, UESTC became one of the nation's key universities in 1960, joined Project 211 in 1997 and Project 985 in 2001, and covers all six national key disciplines in electronic and information science and technology. It is situated in Chengdu, described in university histories as the land of abundance, and it anchors China's semiconductor and defence-electronics base in the southwest.

Within that university, the State Key Laboratory is the national-level concentration for one foundational technology: the thin film. Almost every modern electronic device — transistor, sensor, display, microwave component, infrared detector — is built from layers of material only nanometres to micrometres thick, deposited, patterned and integrated on a substrate. The laboratory exists to master that layer-by-layer science and to carry films through into integrated devices.

What electronic thin films are and why integration matters

A thin film's properties are not simply those of its bulk material shrunk down. At film thicknesses, surfaces, interfaces, strain and defects dominate behaviour: magnetism, ferroelectricity, superconductivity, optical response and charge transport can all be enhanced, suppressed or newly created by how a film is grown and what it is grown on. Electronic thin-film science therefore combines deposition technology, materials physics and device engineering in a single workflow.

Integration is the second half of the laboratory's name and the harder half. A film with excellent properties in isolation is of limited use; an integrated device requires that films be combined with electrodes, dielectrics, semiconductors and packaging, at scales and tolerances compatible with manufacturing, without destroying the properties that made them interesting. The laboratory's recorded programme spans exactly that full chain, from magneto-optical and ferroelectric films to finished infrared detectors and microwave components.

Magnetic and magneto-optical films and spintronics

Magnetic thin films form a major strand of the laboratory's published work. Researchers of the laboratory study the surface magnetic anisotropy of nickel-iron films for high-frequency applications, the Gilbert damping of magnetostrictive iron-cobalt-silicon-boron films — a parameter crucial for magneto-acoustic devices — and flexible yttrium iron garnet films synthesised by pulsed laser deposition for wearable and implantable flexible electronics. Work on spin pumping, the inverse spin Hall effect and spin-orbit torque devices, including edge-mode phase shifters and proposed broadband logic gates, places the laboratory inside spintronics: the effort to use electron spin, alongside charge, to process and store information.

Recent laboratory-affiliated research extends to terahertz spintronics, reporting enhancement of terahertz emission through interfacial orbital hybridisation engineering and spin-to-orbital conversion driven by interfacial oxidation at heavy-metal interfaces. Terahertz modulators based on large-area graphene field-effect transistors and on vanadium dioxide films grown on silicon with alumina buffer layers likewise appear in the laboratory's record, connecting magnetic and electronic films to the emerging technology of terahertz communications and imaging.

Ferroelectric films and dielectric materials

Ferroelectric and dielectric films and ceramics for capacitors, actuators and energy storage are a second core area. Laboratory researchers work on barium strontium titanate, a ferroelectric material with excellent dielectric properties, in composite with bismuth magnesium niobate; on strontium bismuth titanate relaxor ferroelectric ceramics whose breakdown strength is optimised for dielectric energy storage; and on microwave dielectric ceramics — including doped barium zinc cobalt niobate and lanthanum- and dysprosium-substituted samarium oxide ceramics — developed for 5G and 6G applications. Research on advanced electronic packaging substrates with low thermal expansion, low dielectric loss and high thermal stability addresses the interconnection demands of high-frequency communication and ultra-high-density integrated circuits.

These studies share a method characteristic of the laboratory: a device requirement — an energy-storage capacitor that charges and discharges rapidly, a microwave resonator with stable properties, a substrate that does not crack a chip — is translated into requirements on composition, microstructure and film or ceramic processing, which are then optimised systematically. Ferroelectric films named in the laboratory's recorded programme sit alongside these bulk dielectric efforts as the thin-film expression of the same science.

Silicon photonics, optoelectronics and organic electronics

The laboratory's programme spans silicon photonic integration, organic electronics and organic electrochemical transistors, in its recorded description. Silicon photonics integrates optical functions — waveguides, modulators, detectors — onto silicon platforms compatible with electronics manufacturing, a route to faster, more efficient data communication and sensing. Organic electronics uses carbon-based semiconductors that can be processed at low temperature onto flexible substrates, while organic electrochemical transistors, which operate in liquid environments and transduce ionic signals into electronic ones, are especially suited to bioelectronic sensing.

Laboratory-affiliated semiconductor research reinforces the breadth: epitaxial integration of ferroelectric indium selenide films on silicon to build heterojunction solar cells, growth of topological-insulator bismuth selenide films and nanostructures, indium antimonide micro- and nanostructures, and nickel oxide films demonstrated as ammonia sensors all appear in its researchers' publications. Gas sensing is a recurring applied theme, including room-temperature detection of toxic gases with composite films combining conductive MXene materials and zinc oxide for fast, sensitive nitrogen dioxide sensing — work aimed at public health and environmental monitoring.

Infrared detectors and superconducting films: flagship highlights

Two highlights are singled out in accounts of the laboratory. The first is the uncooled microbolometer infrared detector. A microbolometer senses infrared radiation through the temperature-dependent resistance of a suspended film, allowing thermal imaging without cryogenic cooling. Mastery of the sensing film, its thermal isolation structure and its readout integration makes compact infrared cameras possible for surveillance, industry, vehicles and defence — a field in which film quality directly determines image quality.

The second highlight is the fabrication of large-size double-sided YBCO superconducting thin films, listed among UESTC's great achievements. Yttrium barium copper oxide is a high-temperature superconductor; growing large-area films coated on both sides of a substrate, with uniform superconducting properties, is a demanding feat of deposition control. Such films serve in microwave devices with extremely low loss, including filters for communications, where the laboratory's combination of superconducting film growth and microwave device expertise is distinctive. Together, the infrared and superconducting highlights show the laboratory working at both ends of the electromagnetic spectrum with the same underlying craft: controlled film growth carried through to a working device.

Microwave components and LTCC technology

The laboratory's recorded programme includes LTCC ferrite and ceramic composite technology for microwave components. LTCC — low-temperature co-fired ceramic — is a multilayer packaging and integration technology in which ceramic tapes, conductors and passive components are laminated and fired together, producing compact modules for radio-frequency and microwave systems. Ferrite materials within LTCC structures provide non-reciprocal functions such as circulation and isolation that communications and radar systems require.

Adjacent laboratory research on through-glass vias, copper micropillar arrays for heat dissipation in microchannels, aluminium nitride films as isolation layers in phase-change switches, laser bonding for glass-based integrated sensors, and silicon carbide capacitive pressure sensors for harsh high-temperature environments shows the integration half of the mission in action. Devices must be interconnected, cooled, packaged and made reliable, and the laboratory treats those engineering layers as part of its science rather than as an afterthought.

Research output and standing

By international measures the laboratory is a high-output unit. Nature Index data for the period from December 2024 to November 2025 record some 80 research outputs in a single year for the laboratory, with a total share of 32.88, spanning physical sciences and chemistry. (The laboratory's recorded profile cites the same order of magnitude — some 80 outputs in a year in the 2024–25 Nature Index window.) Individual laboratory researchers carry publication records in the hundreds: senior members list 150 to 280 publications each in international profiles, with thousands of citations, across materials science, electromagnetism and solid-state physics.

That output matters beyond bibliometrics. A state key laboratory is expected to be a place where a field's agenda is set, and sustained publication in competitive international journals — on spintronics, dielectrics, sensing films, superconducting films and photonic integration simultaneously — is evidence that the Chengdu laboratory operates at the research frontier across the whole of its brief, not in a single niche.

People and the training mission

The laboratory's researchers include professors whose groups specialise in terahertz science, microwave materials, magnetic films and sensor devices, and who supervise the doctoral and master's researchers through whom the laboratory renews itself. In the Chinese state key laboratory system, training is a formal mission alongside research: laboratories are assessed in part on the researchers they form. Students in the Chengdu laboratory learn deposition, characterisation and device fabrication on national-platform equipment, working on projects linked to China's semiconductor, communications and defence-electronics programmes in the southwest.

Chengdu's position reinforces that mission. The city hosts a concentration of electronics institutes and enterprises descended, in part, from the same 1956 founding that created UESTC. Laboratory graduates move between the university, research institutes and industry within a regional ecosystem purpose-built for electronics, carrying thin-film and device expertise with them.

The laboratory's national role

Electronic thin films are an invisible foundation: no film, no chip, sensor or display. The State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices concentrates China's effort on that foundation in one Chengdu platform — joining fundamental film physics, in magnetic, ferroelectric, superconducting, photonic and organic materials, to the engineering of integrated devices for sensing, communications and infrared imaging. Its flagship results in double-sided superconducting films and uncooled infrared detectors, its LTCC microwave technology and its sustained international publication record together explain its designation: not merely a university laboratory, but the national laboratory for its field.