Erwin Kessels 
At the end of June (June 22–25, 2025), the ALD/ALE 2025 conference took place in Jeju, South Korea. The conference combines the International Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition (25th edition this year) with the Atomic Layer Etching Workshop (12th edition). Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of ALD in Helsinki, and I wrote a … Read more
Earlier, I wrote a blog post about the significance of plasma physics in EUV lithography and how ASML recognizes its importance—so much that ASML has a portion of their “Research” and “Development & Engineering” staff receive training in elementary plasma physics, in addition to the substantial number of plasma physicists they have directly hired. That … Read more
Next week, from August 4 to 7, the ALD/ALE 2024 conference will be held in Helsinki, Finland. This event marks the 24th International Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition and will also include the 11th International Atomic Layer Etching Workshop. This year’s conference is particularly special as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of ALD, commemorating 50 … Read more
My main teaching task at the Eindhoven University of Technology takes place in the fall when I teach the MSc course “Physics of Plasmas and Radiation”. This course is mandatory for all our MSc students in Applied Physics that follow the “Plasma & Beams” track (the other tracks within our department are “Nano, Quantum, Photonics” … Read more
Last year we finished a project called “Taking plasma ALD to the next level” (funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Applied and Engineering Sciences (AES) section). This project was devoted to obtaining a better understanding of plasma ALD such that open scientific and technological questions could be addressed resulting in new plasma … Read more
This blog post is about a short perspective article that I recently wrote for the ILTPC newsletter. ILTPC stands for the International Low Temperature Plasma Community. It is one of the two main communities where I feel at home. The other one is the atomic scale processing community. This one is basically the atomic layer … Read more
On February 15, 2023 (1:00 pm – 5:00 pm (EDT) I will give an AVS Webinar about the topic plasma-assisted ALD. I gave a similar webinar two years ago and you can read about it here as it was covered by the BALD Engineering blog site. Last year I gave an AVS webinar about “ALD … Read more
I’m sure you have heard the buzz in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)… The promise of AI is to augment human abilities in areas such as decision-making, problem-solving, and other tasks. AI systems aim to simulate human intelligence and learn from data to improve their performance over time. ChatGPT is an AI language model … Read more
***Quick link to the open access paper: “Foundations of atomic-level plasma processing in nanoelectronics”*** We have just published a topical review paper entitled “Foundations of atomic-level plasma processing in nanoelectronics” in the journal Plasma Sources Science and Technology. This review is part of a two-part collection of papers on Foundations of Low Temperature Plasmas and … Read more
Recently, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) revealed six research projects to receive funding within its Open Technology Programme. We are proud to announce that our project – Atomic Layer Deposition and Etching for Quantum Computing – is among these projects! In this blog we will outline why this project was conceived, and why the addition … Read more