1. General context

1.1 State of the art and overview of the main production techniques

Since the 1970s, many materials have been synthesized in the form of thin films, and a wide range of processing techniques have been developed in parallel. To review the state of the art of the various materials synthesized in the form of thin films is also to provide an overview of the different technologies used. Without going into the case of semiconductors, which is not the subject of this article, it is important to mention that the very first thin films were produced using the liquid-phase epitaxy technique, and that these were semiconductors such as GaAs, InP and GaAlAs for the manufacture of the very first laser diodes. Since then, this crystallogenesis technique has played an increasingly important role in...