I’ve been teaching a class at the University of Texas at Austin giving an overview of the processes for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. This fall I did something different – I am flipped my classroom. I recorded each of my lectures ahead of time and required my students to watch the lectures before they came to class. Class time was then devoted to discussion, problem solving, and the occasional philosophical digression. While improvements will be necessary for the next year, the experiment was, I think, a success.

One outcome of the flipped classroom is a complete set of lectures for my class, available on YouTube. I have combined those lectures with reading and homework assignments as well as practice exams and other material. The result: a self-paced online course, available to anyone. I hope it will be the first of many.

The course name is Chemical Processes for Micro- and Nanofabrication (chemical engineering department, with course designator CHE323). It is basically an overview of all the process steps used in semiconductor manufacturing, with some nanofabrication concepts thrown in at the end. Here is the link:

http://www.lithoguru.com/scientist/CHE323/

Enjoy.

Lithographers don’t get to see me in a suit.

When I first started working in the semiconductor industry, I started out wearing a tie to conferences (I didn’t own a suit back then), but quickly realized that not only were ties optional, you were better off not wearing them. Sales and marketing folks wore ties. To an engineer, wearing a tie made you suspect. I quickly ditched the ties.

Except in Japan. When I started traveling to Japan in the early 1990s, I bought some suits. Those are still my only suits (and they still fit … barely). But I stopped wearing them 10 years ago even to Japan. The trend towards casual has caught up to the conservative corporate culture of Japan.

So, most of my friends in the lithography world have never seen me in a suit. Well, here is what it looks like.

I gave a talk last week at an investment banker conference in Hong Kong. Suit required. Someday maybe the finance folks will catch up to where lithographers have been all along.

Yesterday I went to the College of Nanoscale Engineering of the University of Albany, State University of New York (which, for the sake of brevity and sanity, I will call CNSE). There I visited CNSE, SEMATECH, IBM, TEL, and a number of other organizations in the same building that required separate badges and sign-ins. All of these groups have at least one thing in common: entering requires one to go past giant, larger-than-life posters of President Obama.

It seems that last year the President paid a visit to CNSE and got a tour of the clean room. And since the one thing that CNSE does even better than nanoscale engineering is public relations, I guess the bragging with giant posters was inevitable. Still, I thought it was very cool to see people I know (hi, Warren!) pointing out lithography tools to the President. As I stared with wonder upon my arrival, slowly an odd sensation crept over me – something was wrong, out of place. Then I realized, the President was not in a bunny suit, or wearing any clean-room garb at all (not even safety glasses!). Neither was Governor Cuomo. And neither were the engineers in the pictures with them, though they certainly knew better.

Clean room garments are necessary to protect the pristine cleanliness of our wafers and equipment from the inherent dirtiness of our human bodies. But it gets worse. As expected, security for a Presidential visit is quite strict. A thorough sweep of the clean room was carried out by numerous secret service agents, including bomb sniffing dogs. That’s right, dogs roaming the clean room! The sticky mats at the entry ways between rooms were covered with dog hair. And it turns out that many process chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing smell just like bomb-making materials. The dogs went crazy. The agents were nervous. Some equipment had to be dismantled.

I suppose when the support for your lab relies almost entirely on government funding, the inconvenience of dirtying your clean room is a small price to pay for the publicity of a Presidential visit. It took about one month for defect levels in the clean room to get back to pre-visit levels. That’s a big interruption in work schedule. But at least they have some cool posters to show for it.

Here’s my chance for joining Murphy and the other immortals of science and engineering:

Mack’s Law: If you call your own idea a “law”, then it isn’t one.

I just read a nice article by Tom Rigoli entitled “Experiencing Silicon Valley”, which, as you might expect, was about his experiences in Silicon Valley. I especially enjoyed this little box embedded in the story:

Who Named Silicon Valley?
Don C. Hoefler (1923-1986) coined the term in a 1971 series of articles that was published in Electronic News, the only major weekly covering the emerging semiconductor industry. Don was the West Coast reporter for EN at the same time I was West Coast editor for the monthly EDN magazine. I regularly bumped into him at press conferences. In his brief San Francisco obituary, they credited him with naming “Silicon Valley,” noting that he later quipped when asked about it, “How was I to know that the term would be adopted industry wide and become generic worldwide?”

G’day! Greetings from Auckland, New Zealand. I’m here attending the Sixth International Conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (AMN-6). As the name implies it has been a week of graphene, buckyballs, and nanotubes, biologically inspired surfaces, quantum effects, and self-assembled everything. While there were some talks on “top-down” fabrication (like traditional lithography), most of the emphasis was on “bottoms up”: letting the physics of some process naturally create small structures. I saw the self-assembly of nanostructures using block copolymers of course, but also using the shear forces of spin coating, dewetting during evaporation, and deep reactive ion etching. One definitely gets one’s quota of strange ideas at a conference like this.

AMN always attracts Nobel Prize winners (I’m not the only one who likes to come to New Zealand), and this year Roald Hoffmann (Chemistry, 1981) gave a keynote speech and a public lecture. Both were excellent. The keynote looked at the use of the diamond anvil to put materials at pressures up to one million atmospheres (similar to the pressure at the center of the earth). At these pressures everything becomes a metal. His public lecture (at the Auckland Museum) was more philosophical, looking at the many tensions in chemistry. Some memorable quotes from that lecture:

“Beauty resides at the boundary between order and chaos.”
“Chemistry is less in the business of discovery and more in the business of creation.”
“My papers are written for the intelligent graduate student, and I have a lot of trouble getting them published as a result.”

Alas, many (most?) of the talks at this conference were aimed a little higher than the intelligent graduate student, and I couldn’t follow quite a few of them. I enjoyed hearing Mike Kelly (University of Cambridge) complain that many of the ideas promoted by nanotechnologists were inherently non-manufacturable. “Manufacturability is the key gateway to everything. It should be our main focus.” He was doubtful that any bottoms-up approach to fabrication could ever become manufacturable (the problem: defects). The few lithography talks (Richard Blaikie, Idriss Blakey, and a few others) were of course of interest to me, but the real value of a conference like this is to pull your head out of the details of your current problem domain and see a broad range of activities in nanoscience. For that, the conference has been a success.

The last evening of the conference gave us the banquet. It being Valentine’s day, the requested dress was described as “smart, with a hint of romance.” Unfortunately, I only packed “dumb, with no chance of romance.” But, since it was a nanotechnology conference, I wasn’t out of place.

When the last day of the conference rolled around on Friday, I decided to skip out. It is time to see the important landmarks of this beautiful country. Cheers!

Yesterday, Grant Willson and Jean Fréchet received the Japan Prize. (Grant must have travel to Japan quickly, since he was at a party at my house on Saturday night.) When I saw the reports this morning, I have to admit that my first question was “What’s the Japan Prize?” Willson and Fréchet have received many awards in their careers. Was this one any different?

In a word, “Yes!” First of all, Drs. Willson and Fréchet were handed their award by the Emperor of Japan. Second, the award comes with ¥50M (that’s about $650,000), split between the two of them. Either one of these would make one stand up and take note. Here is a description of the prize from the Japan Prize website:

“The Japan Prize is a prestigious international award presented to individuals whose original and outstanding achievements are not only scientifically impressive, but have also served to promote peace and prosperity for all mankind. The Prize is awarded by the Japan Prize Foundation. Since its inception in 1985, the Foundation has awarded 74 people from 13 countries. Each year the Foundation designates two fields for award presentation.”

Willson and Fréchet were honored for their invention of chemically amplified photoresists, a material instrumental in the manufacture of every state-of-the-art integrated circuit for the last 20 years. (A third collaborator, Hiroshi Ito, died in 2009.)

Congratulations to Grant and Jean – a prize well deserved!

Last night I went to see a performance at the Paramount Theater here in Austin. The Paramount is one of those gorgeous, old-style, 100 year-old theaters, a premier place to watch a show, with seating for 1,200. I’ve been to plays and Broadway shows there, and seen John Prine, Leo Kottke, Ottmar Liebert and a host of other great musicians. But yesterday’s show, at a ticket price of $50, may have been my most expensive. Who did I see? A physicist, Brian Greene. The author of The Elegant Universe talked about quantum mechanics, string theory, and the possibility of parallel universes.

Are you surprised that a lecture about physics would sell out a theater at $50/ticket? I am. And the crowd was enthusiastic! There were whistles when he walked on stage. After the 80 minute lecture, he spent 30 minutes answering questions from the audience – he finally had to call it quits with many hands still in the air. I was also surprised to see how diverse the crowd was: about 50% women (a great date-night event, no doubt), with ages from middle school to geriatric. I watched a mom drop off three cute, young high school girls outside the theater, replete with their spiral notebooks and pencil boxes.

In a world where Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan command outsized attention, yesterday restored a little faith in humanity for me. Rock on, physics!

Today, my oldest daughter stayed home sick with a cold. The younger one didn’t want to go to preschool when her sister was staying home. That pretty much ruined my plans for Christmas shopping today. I stayed home while my wife went grocery shopping. At 2 pm I took the younger daughter to a birthday party. Kid birthday parties can be fun, but this one was at Dave and Buster’s – only one small step better than the worst place to have a party, Chuck E. Cheese. Lights, noise – Las Vegas for kids. Still, I survived. Then, it was home and a quick clean-up of the house (two little girls = large increase in entropy). Some guests came over for dinner – mussels in white wine, plus a few glasses of La Fin du Monde beer. It was excellent. It’s nice being married to a great cook.

That’s pretty much how I spent my last day of the 5,125 year Mayan Long Count calendar, just before the global apocalypse.

At age 14, I thought Dave Brubeck was the coolest musician ever. Like so many people, I discovered the Dave Brubeck Quartet through their 1959 album Time Out, the first jazz record to sell over a million copies. The album is a magnificent exploration of meter, and I still find it amazing that they could create a 5/4 song (Take Five, written by their sax player Paul Desmond) so catchy that it gets stuck in your head.

One day I was listening to Brubeck once again in my bedroom when my mom walked by, poked her head in and asked, “Is that Dave Brubeck?” I was shocked that she even knew who Dave Brubeck was, let alone recognized his music. My dad loved Johnny Cash, that I knew, but as far as I could recall my mom had never expressed a musical preference in my presence. Not that I paid much attention – she was my mom, after all. “You know Dave Brubeck?” I replied with some trepidation. “Oh yes,” she said. “I went to see him in concert when I was in college.”

There are only a few times in one’s life when one receives information so out of line with your worldview that to grasp it requires every ounce of intellectual and emotional fortitude that can be mustered. At such moments the carefully constructed edifice of your mental interior can come crashing down around you. If this, this thing I believed so strongly and without question, is wrong, what else about my life has deceived me? What else have I viewed through this distorted lens? Everything becomes open to question. Your foundational beliefs. Your conception of yourself. It is a mental state so venerable and fraught with danger that many people simply don’t allow themselves to experience it.

I experienced my first worldview collapse at that moment. David Brubeck was cool. People who listened to Dave Brubeck were cool. People who went to see Dave Brubeck in concert were super cool. But cool, that was just a word I never thought to use with my mom. Now, my mom was a great mom and even during my teenage years I had no problems with her. But to a 14-year-old boy, “mom” was on the opposite side of the spectrum from “cool”. As I listened to Brubeck on his piano, as I imagined myself blowing a Paul Desmond riff on the saxophone, as I hoped one day to see the Dave Brubeck Quartet perform “Blue Rondo a La Turk” live, was I trying to be like my mother?

Since that moment, I’ve had to make major realignments of my relationship with reality only a couple of times more. While every time was hard, I was always extremely happy with the result – a life a little more grounded, a little more authentic, a little easier to be proud of.

Dave Brubeck died a few days ago, and while he continued to give concerts into his 90s, I never saw him perform live. I guess my mom will always be a little more cool than me.