The students and faculty mentors of Iowa State's first summer semiconductor workshop include: Front row (from left), Moneim Ismal, Rana Biswas (project co-leader), Ashraf Khokhar (chair of electrical and computer engineering), Dylan Hoag, Vikram Dalal (project co-leader), Jonas Jaritz, Isaac Miller, Zachary Bowers and Mason Inman. Back row (from left), Carsten Gammel, Vincent Rasset, Jacob Boswell, Santosh Pandey (project leader) and Donovan Keever.

AMES, Iowa – The students had ticked off the step-by-step boxes running down the guide for their first microfabrication lab of the first summer semiconductor workshop at Iowa State University.

Wet Oxidation

Push: check

Ramp up: check

Bubbler: check

Oxidation: check

Ramp down: check

Pull: check

The students took appropriate lab notes – oxidation was at 1,050 degrees Celsius (1,922 degrees Fahrenheit) for 19 minutes, 3:07-3:26 p.m. – and otherwise learned their way around the Microfabrication Teaching Lab at Iowa State’s Microelectronics Research Center.

“For me, this was an opportunity for a new technology experience I wouldn’t have otherwise,” said Vincent Rasset, a student at Iowa Western Community College in Council Bluffs. “This is a real-life approach to a technology that’s also a hot industry right now. This is an amazing opportunity.”

Providing that opportunity is a major goal of the new, year-long, semiconductor-training program established at Iowa State earlier this year. A U.S. National Science Foundation workforce development initiative – ExLENT, Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies – is supporting the program and student scholarships with a three-year, $997,540 grant led by Santosh Pandey, an Iowa State professor of electrical and computer engineering. (See sidebar for the entire project team.)

In their grant proposal, the Iowa State semiconductor team wrote about the workforce needs of the semiconductor industry: “Industry projections suggest that there will be approximately 67,100 unfilled technical jobs in the U.S. chip industry by 2030. This project will help the state of Iowa address the talent gap and contribute to the U.S. semiconductor workforce.”

The program’s summer session is designed to be particularly useful for workforce training.

“This summer workshop is all about hands-on experience in semiconductor laboratories, learning firsthand how to design, build and test your own devices and chips,” Pandey said. “In the fall, we will continue to provide the resources needed for the students to grow research interests and publications in semiconductors for internships and jobs in semiconductor companies.”

Pandey said the program attracted more than 70 applicants in its first year, with 35 from Iowa. The original cohort features seven students from across Iowa. They started in late spring and will continue into the fall. The program will tentatively accept nine students next year and 12 the following year, for a three-year total of 28.

Important for future jobs

The semiconductor academy’s first class includes three students from Iowa State, two from Iowa Western Community College, one from the Eastern Iowa Community Colleges (which include Clinton, Muscatine and Scott community colleges in the Quad Cities region) and one transfer from EICC to Iowa State.

As a kind of pre-internship, they’re being paid for their learning efforts, which include online sessions and four weeks of the summer workshop at Iowa State, including lessons in lab safety and microfabrication, plus another two weeks of the summer session at Ames-based PowerFilm Inc., for experience in advanced manufacturing.

Moneim Ismail, a research scientist at the Microelectronics Research Center who is coordinating the summer session, said the students will leave the workshop after building and testing a working, silicon-based transistor built at the micron scale, just millionths of a meter.

“They’ll do step-by-step fabrication by their hands,” Ismail said. “This is important for getting future jobs with semiconductor companies.”

In the fall, Mason Inman, a doctoral student in computer engineering, will work with the students as they pick specialized topics they’d like to learn more about. Cheng Wang, an Iowa State assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will also mentor students on artificial intelligence hardware.

And how have the students done?

“They are enjoying this and making progress,” Ismail said.

“So far it’s going really well,” Inman said. “They’re very talented and hard-working students.”

‘A big opportunity for me’

Carsten Gammel, a student at Scott Community College, said it wasn’t the program’s science or semiconductor lessons that interested him.

“The appeal for me was the manufacturing,” he said. “I like to work with my hands. It was great going to PowerFilm to see industry-scale manufacturing. That was impressive.”

Jacob Boswell of Iowa Western Community College noted Iowa State’s labs, equipment and faculty expertise.

“As a student from a small community college, this was a big opportunity for me that I wouldn’t have had otherwise,” he said just outside the lab space in the Microelectronics Research Center. “This is an amazing facility.”

Dylan Hoag, an Iowa State student studying electrical engineering, said the goal for a recent workshop day was to learn about photolithography, or using ultraviolet light to make specific patterns on silicon wafers.

And what did he know about semiconductors before the workshop? 

“Absolutely nothing,” he said.

But that’s changed as he and the other students keep ticking the boxes on their lab sheets:

Pattern Photoresist

Spin HMDS: check

Spin photoresist: check

Prebake: check

UV Exposure: check

Develop: check

Cascade rinse: check

Dry: check

Inspect: check

Postbake: check

– 30 –

Contacts

Santosh Pandey, Electrical and Computer Engineering, pandey@iastate.edu, 515-294-7504

Mike Krapfl, News Service, mkrapfl@iastate.edu, 515-294-4917

The project team

• Santosh Pandey, professor of electrical and computer engineering, project leader
• Vikram Dalal, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering
• Meng Lu, associate professor, electrical and computer engineering
• Cheng Wang, assistant professor, electrical and computer engineering
• Rana Biswas, adjunct professor in electrical and computer engineering; research scientist, Microelectronics Research Center
• Arun Somani, senior associate dean, the Philip Tate Sproul and Virginia Shivers Sproul Endowed Chair, College of Engineering
• Roger Bentley, coordinator for transfer recruitment and student success, College of Engineering
• Liang Dong, former project member and former Iowa State professor and director of the Microelectronics Research Center, now at the University of Georgia