Believe it or not, I started my first lithography company while I was in high school. My parents had moved our family to Texas in order to start a business, so the idea of starting my own business just seemed natural to me. After giving up on my first idea of a used book store, I settled on printing T-shirts. The silk-screen process begins with using contact printing on a photographic emulsion on the screen. Both resolution for fine lines and overlay for four-color printing were important. Still, I spent most of my time worrying about defects (the emulsion getting beat up during screening) and turn-around time (customers can be so demanding). In the end, lithographic quality didn’t matter much as my business acumen was insufficient to allow my survival. It didn’t occur to me that this was my first lithography job until many, many years later, since I certainly didn’t use the word “lithography” (or even know what it meant) until after I got into the semiconductor industry.

I suppose that the failure of my first business was inevitable, since I was soon bound for college anyway (though I was able to make some extra money in college by printing T-shirts and hats for various campus groups). In high school I was a good student, but it was in college, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, that I found my groove. I graduated four years later with four bachelor degrees (physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, and chemical engineering).

Next Time: my failure in graduate school, and how it led to a career in semiconductor lithography