Teaching the 'why'

Although cutting-edge university research programs are often in the limelight, teaching remains the core of the college experience. After all, even successful research that leads to new product technologies must rely on trained personnel on the production lines to run processes and tools. However, few institutions focus exclusively on educating tomorrow's workforce or improving the skills of those already working in the fabs, equipment plants, and materials houses. The Microelectronics Teaching Factory (MTF), located on the Arizona State University East campus in Mesa, is one of the rare facilities dedicated to giving students experience and training in a semiconductor manufacturing setting.

ASU East occupies the former grounds of Williams Air Force Base, a few miles off Superstition Freeway. I visited the site in late October, almost a year to the day after MTF's dedication ceremony in 2002. My tour guide was Richard Newman, the lab's enthusiastic director of training operations.

"The primary focus here is not research. It is teaching undergraduates and graduates." (There are also a few hundred community college students using the facility.) "The emphasis in this laboratory is not only the how, but more so the why."

Digging into the whys and hows takes place in MTF's 15,000-sq-ft building, most of which is a Class 100 cleanroom. Three multipurpose bays enclose the various 6-inch process and metrology tools. An MRC 903 sputtering tool coming on line will make the lab "device capable," according to Newman. "We [will] have all the processes and all the equipment that are required to manufacture some level of device."

The MTF infrastructure facilities include RO/DI ultrapure water and acid waste neutralization systems as well as a liquid nitrogen column. Although state monies covered the costs of modifying the structure and constructing the cleanroom, industry donations as well as direct participation by chip company professionals have played a huge part in the lab's initial success.

"Every tool you see in here was donated," Newman told me. "Intel, Motorola, ASML, STMicro—there's just a litany of companies that have donated. We have a very active industry advisory board that meets monthly and is still looking at settling the donations and filling the gaps in the laboratory that support our curriculum. A donation is of no value to us if it doesn't somehow enhance our curriculum and our laboratory and our hands-on application within the lab."

The compiling and writing of curriculum for the various pieces of equipment is perhaps the faculty's most daunting task. "Since these are all industry-donated tools, writing curriculum around them is really tough, because they were not necessarily designed to teach on," Newman points out. "You're receiving 15 or 20 or 30 manuals, a couple of thousand pages each, and our students are not going to read those. We have to boil that down, wrap some curriculum around it, so they can quickly come up to speed on the tool." An NSF grant helps fund the curriculum-writing process.

The program has sometimes benefited from the consolidations of its industry partners. Lakshmi Munukutla, director of MTF, recalls how the closure of a Motorola facility helped them out a couple of years ago. "The cleanroom was designed for Class 100, but only parts of the cleanroom were meeting the requirements because we had to scatter the filters to get reasonable cleanliness. But Motorola came through when they were closing their flat-panel-display [fab], and we got almost 100 brand-new HEPA filters. They weren't even opened and were still in the box." Newman told me that Motorola also donated an engineering team to devise a reflective ceiling plan and help with the filter upgrade.

Pragmatism rules the day at MTF, as Munukutla noted. "We have the semiconductor equipment. But that doesn't mean you're only learning the semiconductor thing, that's just a part of it. We will emphasize it, but the total skill set that you will get can be much more wide open, and then you can apply those skills anywhere. That's the kind of message we are trying to portray to our students."

For more on ASU East's Microelectronics Teaching Factory, log onto www.east.asu.edu/mtf.