The photos in this blog post were made by DIWAS Photography, Seattle Event Photographer Two weeks ago the 19th International Conference on Atomic Layer Deposition, featuring also the 6th International Atomic Layer Etching Workshop, took place in Bellevue, WA. As
Bridging academia and business – the heart of a successful collaboration in atomic scale processing
Fitting to the contents of this post on collaboration, this post will appear both on Atomic Limits and on the Oxford Instruments Plasma Technology blog. What defines a truly successful collaboration? It has to be something where the whole is
Topographically selective processing
– Taking selectivity up a notch by processing in the 3rd dimension
Recently, the art of processing materials in a selective manner has garnered significant attention. Especially in the past few years, the topic of making atomic scale processing techniques, such as atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etching (ALE), more
Towards Area-Selective Atomic Layer Deposition with High Selectivity
– Our perspective on area-selective ALD
We just published a perspective article entitled “From the bottom-up: towards area-selective atomic layer deposition with high selectivity”.1 This perspective describes the current status of the field of area-selective atomic layer deposition (ALD), and also includes my vision on how
Where do our students and postdocs go? Mainly to ASML?
– About the alumni of the Plasma & Materials Processing research group
When evaluating what comes out of a university research group, often the research carried out by the group is given most attention. However, obviously, the most important product of a research group is not the research itself but it’s the
Plasma ALD and substrate biasing
– The impact of energetic ions on film properties
“Plasma ions create electronic defects in sensitive substrates as well as generate a large electronic trap density in deposited films, especially detrimental for gate dielectric applications.” This is a sentence that I read about 10 years ago (in January 2007
Why are solar cell physics important? – How thermodynamics of the selective membrane model help us understand passivating contacts
The title of this post deserves some clarification. Isn’t the answer obvious? You need to understand how solar cells work in order to improve them and physics are the foundation of that understanding, right? We suspect that most people would
Surface science aspects of (plasma) ALD reactions
– Extending the legacy of Harold Winters
The fact that Dr. Harold Winters passed away last year – at the age of 83 – has led to initiatives in tribute of Harold and his profound contributions to plasma science. One of these initiatives is a Special Issue
In situ spectroscopic ellipsometry and ALD
– How ellipsometry became a popular technique to monitor ALD film growth
Serendipity is often cited as a key factor in scientific innovations. I can fully confirm this as will also be obvious from the subtitle of this blog site: “Blog about strategy, serendipity and vision in nanoscience”. From my point of
Uniform or Area-Selective ALD of In2O3:H?
– It’s all about nucleation
A little while ago I wrote a blog about my PhD project. In this blog, I explained that most of my PhD project revolved around an atomic layer deposition (ALD) process that I developed to make hydrogen-doped indium oxide (In2O3:H):